This paper locates the experience of and the reflection upon translation in the framework of foundational issues raised by the works of Popper, Kuhn and Feyerabend. Then we proceed to a thorough examination of a sampling of propositions related to Andrew Chesterman’s popperian and darwinian stance, the incommensurability between Berman’s and Toury’s research programs, the introduction to corpora studies by Mona Baker, advocating the notion of a “third code” put forth by William Frawley, and, last but not the least, the evolutive nature of the protocol performed by the GRETI team in its new north american french translation of Faulkner. So we came to three conclusions: 1) any processing of data in translation studies is based on an a posteriori knowledge and should be implemented with “soft” axiomatics dealing with trends and regularities without any necessary binding to strong causal or final conditions; 2) any proposition formulated in this framework should keep a non deterministic profile; 3) translation as experience and self-examination is governed by an evolutive protocol. We conclude by putting forth some premisses of a pluralistic, open, scientific endeavor, joining issue with the critical stance advocated by the austrian philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend.