The globalization of communication and exchanges makes it necessary to apply an approach to translation, a cultural act, which is less ethnocentric and more universal, more complete. The debates that have long opposed source-oriented to target-oriented approaches have only accentuated the ethnocentric penchant of different translation schools. Thus, one notices the weakness of a target-oriented approach in the translation between two far-off cultural and linguistic universes, for example in the case of the translation of an African work into a European language. This article aims to demonstrate that it is not about favouring either of these approaches, but more about finding a compromise that takes into account the whole body of communicative objectives of the work to translate.