This paper attempts to show that the unit of translation, even though it has long been used by both translators and theorists, is not a very fruitful concept when it comes to describing the translation process. The way in which it has been defined up to now is either too restrictive to be valid or too broad to be manageable. It will appear that it is much more productive to consider translation from a hermeneutic point of view on the basis of both the working unit of translation (the portion of source text which is being processed at a particular time) and the complexity of the factors involved in the process. The notion of hermeneutic halo will be proposed as a useful tool in this context. Combined with the working unit of translation, it helps describe the translation process and is a means of accounting for the great variety of translations a single original can lead to.