Paul Ricœur and Jacques Derrida are famous representatives of hermeneutics and deconstruction respectively in France in the 20th century. Translation occupies an important position in the ideological process of these two philosophers. As an important concept of memory in Freud's psychoanalysis theory, "mourning" has repeatedly appeared in their discourse, and is closely combined with the relationship between oneself and others. Whether mourning can be broken away becomes one of the differences in their thinking on translation, which on the one hand comes from their different interpretations of the Bible texts, especially the story of the Tower of Babel, and on the other hand comes from their different textual theories. "Mourning" provides a new starting point to compare the translation ethics of Ricœur and Derrida.