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Translators are baroque characters inherently out of place. The way they look at technique and their very role in the translation process are layered with countless misunderstanding and prejudices. The craft of technical translation exhibits four aesthetical characteristics which, in a perfect world, would also be those of any technical text: exhaustiveness, monosemy, precision, and collective accessibility. More often than not, the output is much more standardized than the input was. The translated text is user-oriented and has to be seen as a machine. Its production summons up a technical imagination, also highly standardized, based on mathematics and geometry, whose rules are akin to those of modern architecture.