A general survey of the history of ideas about translation reveals that most of them were centered on the acceptability of different (translated) versions of a text, and less concerned with how the translator confronts the source language and transforms it into the target language. The theories of language and perception that we find in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and of his student Merleau-Ponty, and also in theories of the aesthetics of translation in Gadamer's hermeneutics, might offer us a useful frame of reference. This paper will present and criticize the discourses of translation that we find in both hermeneutics and phenomenology, insofar as these are tied to Merleau-Ponty's ideas about language. Merleau-Ponty takes language as a sort of "visual field" or totality, a field of perception, so that translating the words of one language into those of another can in effect be "seen" as the transformation of an entire linguistic-visual "field", and thus in effect also as an artistic transformation such as we might have if one painting were gradually (or suddenly) transformed into another. Thus linguistic transformation becomes a key concept, and here I would also like to relate this conception to the constructive role of translation in cross-cultural communication