Translation has become an essential skill, highly sought after in both academic and professional contexts today, given the widespread use of information technology and the rise in global migration. Such factors have all contributed to the evolution of linguistics alongside the fields of comparative literature, computer science, philology, philosophy, semiotics and terminology. The genesis of this seminal volume in translation studies was the 2011 translation by one editor of the other’s landmark study, Jean-René Ladmiral’s Traduire: théorèmes pour la traduction (1979). Too often the words of a translator describing the experience of working with a text are relegated to a simple preface or postscript within the larger context of the work as a whole. Entire works on the experience of translation are fairly rare. It is for this reason that Jadir and Ladmiral seek to give a voice to translators, who are often overlooked, in order to champion the field of translation studies. This volume is inspired by Umberto Eco’s works and emulates the great tradition Eco began of respect for his translators as co-authors, conceiving of translation as a negotiation. Translation should be viewed as a sort of bilingual love affair: the translator possesses a love of two languages, two cultures, two identities, two civilizations, two worlds between which he struggles to find a delicate balance. This “margin of freedom” when translating is not without its own perils. What little creative freedom is left to the translator, as Marcel Proust noted, means the translator is at once co-author and rewrites a work, a task comparable to that of a writer. In recent years, translation studies has undergone a significant transformation, especially in the context of cultural translation, a concept developed in the field of cultural studies, but also in regard to ethics and the study of localization. For Jacques Derrida, a text survives beyond the capacity of its author when translated. Thus, translators base their theoretical observations on the practice of translation. This became evident in the last two decades of the 20^th century since greater emphasis has been placed on theory than practice and hence the voice of the source author. Goethe wrote that we should consider the translator’s role as breathing new life into a text in the sense that he is a co-author. Later, Walter Benjamin noted that the goal of translation is neither the reception nor the reproduction of a text in another language, but to make the reader desire the text in its original form. The contributions in this formidable study are as rich as they are varied: invoking a wide variety of disciplines across the humanities from philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, literature, translation studies, didactics, and rhetoric. The authors hail from diverse academic, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. While the general tendency in this volume is to privilege the practical over the theoretical, this method goes against the grain of the preference for theory, built up over the last two decades of the 20^th century, in which theoreticians began a veritable reign of terror upon the field of translation studies. Instead, here for the first time, the gap between the practical and the theoretical is bridged by authors who are not throwing around empty theory, but whose observations are well-founded by the depth of their experience; on the one hand those who have practised translation extensively, and on the other those who have verified the works of other authors and translators to comment upon their works. Translation is an inherently subjective process. It is therefore for this reason that one cannot talk about translation without having translated oneself. In “Expérience du traducteur, …