In the literature dealing with the onomasiological phase of translation, various terms are often used with no real distinction to refer to rephrasing: “rewording”, “restating”, “rewriting”, “recreating”. However, the analysis of these terms in the wider perspective of language sciences, both from an intra- and interlinguistic point of view, suggests that they are not exactly synonymous and are variously distributed along the literary/pragmatic, oral/written and common/specialized axes. Moreover, it appears that the prefix “re-”, which is very productive in French, does not only denote a new occurrence and change and can have its own meaning, beyond that of the verbal stem to which it is attached.