Bilingual lexicon extraction from comparable corpora is generally addressed through two monolingual distributional spaces of context vectors connected through a (partial) bilingual lexicon. We sketch here an abstract view of the task where these two spaces are embedded into one common bilingual space, and the two comparable corpora are merged into one bilingual corpus. We show how this paradigm accounts for a variety of models proposed so far, and where a set of topics addressed so far take place in this framework: degree of comparability, ambiguity in the bilingual lexicon, where parallel corpora stand with respect to this view, e.g., to replace the bilingual lexicon. A first experiment, using comparable corpora built from parallel corpora, illustrates one way to put this framework into practice. We also outline how this paradigm suggests directions for future investigations. We finally discuss the current limitations of the model and directions to solve them.