Like written ethnography, the museum is a 'translation of culture'. Like the written form, it has to represent the dialogic realities of cultural encounters in a fixed and intelligible form, to propose categories that define and order the material it has gathered. As the public face of academic ethnography, the museum interprets other cultures for the benefit of the general reader, and in that task museum practice, like all ethnography, operates within very specific historical and political parameters. The present article looks at how museums in western Europe are responding to the issues raised by critical ethnographers: is globalisation increasing the degree of accountability imposed on the ethnographic museum, or merely reinforcing older patterns? What opportunities and problems are raised by the use of more words – more 'translation' in the narrower sense – in ethnographic museums, and how do museums gain from introducing a reflexive and contextualizing concept of "thick translation" into their work of interpretation?