A study of the discourses on translation and pastiche in the 19th and 20th centuries serves as a basis to examine the archeology of translation thought in France and Italy, highlighting the radical difference between these neighbor territories. Articulating the political and linguistic histories of the two countries, this work aims to show how the linguistic imaginaries and sentiments which developed in French and Italian culture are responsible for shaping radically other perceptions of the à-traduire (‘yet-to-translate’).This work originates in a reading of what Foucault calls the “spoken structure of the perceived”: the discourses on translation and imitation which, through verbalization, render visible the perception of resemblances between original and second texts. In this thesis, the thinking of translation is less a consciously produced thinking than a thinking belonging to the discourses themselves, which can only appear in their circulation. A thinking that is also an epistemology.