From a historical and theoretical perspective, this paper builds upon interviews conducted with language students and university teachers in order to explore the translating process in language teaching. Following a historical overview of the roles given to translation in language teaching, this article will examine how "ways of being" and "ways of doing" make the translating process into a space allowing anchor and transformation, opening new possible meanings, experiences and relations for language appropriation. This paper develops upon a conception of the translating process implying a sense of "availability and sensibility" to others, and constitutes an "art of the attention" (Morizot 2020:26). In that perspective, we value the translating process rather than the translation as the product of a "translating skill" (Pergola 2020) aiming firstly at a linguistic-communicative result. This process is at the very heart of the relation to others in a sensitive, immaterial, poetic but also tangible, concrete and attentive way.