This paper examines the context of intercultural relations in the field of international aid and development. Exploring the activities of a large UK-based transnational NGO (OxfamGB) through a detailed reading of its own 60-year-long archived story, the paper tries to reimagine the ‘contact zones’ of aid and development as multilingual and intercultural. In doing so, it presents an empirically grounded explanation of intercultural relations within a transnational institution, and seeks both to supply additional understandings of the politico-social power dynamics which frame such intercultural fields, and to add to current critiques of Western donor ‘upward accountability’ in development with its focus on the contractual, the standard and the quantifiable.