Translation can be perceived as the crossing of a boundary between two texts and the translator is often portrayed as a go-between bridging the gap between an author and a readership. Crossing this boundary is difficult in polysemous discourses based on double-talk, double-dealing and double meaning. The purpose of this collection of articles is to analyse the problems raised by the translation of ambiguous language in several linguistic fields and within a very heterogeneous corpus, which nevertheless provides a thorough understanding of the evolution of practices and of the strategies and methods the translator contrives so as to remain as faithful as possible to the authors’ original versions: the latter can be read and translated as if they were palimpsests. Translators are not simply go-betweens and can hardly remain detached from the text, for they grapple with meanings/senses and their own senses: this could be defined as “guts translation”.