 According to Saussure, the sign is naturally arbitrary, so it can only derive meaning from contrast in other signs in that same system.However, Russian scholar Leonid Barkhudarov stated that, limiting it to poetry, for instance, a translation unit can take the form of a complete text.This seems to relate to his conception that a translation unit is the smallest unit in the source language with an equivalent in the target one, and when its parts are taken individually, they become untranslatable; these parts can be as small as phonemes or morphemes, or as large as entire texts.