Le « Paradigme de la Traduction » et l’Apprentissage Profond: Regard Rétrospectif sur Deux Ouvrages de François Ost

In two books published in 2009, the jurist and philosopher François Ost develops the notion of a “translation paradigm”, of which law could be a privileged field of application and the construction of European law the most convincing example (Ost, 2009a; Ost, 2009b). Through this analysis, Ost positions himself within a specific tradition of translation studies and establishes a dichotomy between the “translation paradigm” and the “communication paradigm”, an opposition that underpins his critique of a machine translation model (Ost, 2009b). This paper suggests that revisiting Ost’s two works today can provide valuable retro- spective insights into the issues raised by the development of machine translation systems based on deep learning, with respect to a “translation paradigm” that, according to the author, could account for both the work of the translator and some of the everyday operations of jurists (Ost, 2009a).