The article develops the idea of literary maps in their complex relationships with translation. It advances insights concerning the mapping of (power) relations between cultures, both on a conceptual and on an empirical-descriptive level. The author envisages dynamic literary world maps, whereby conflicts between traditional an innovating principles of legitimacy act as a principle of change. Translation is a case in point for the discussion of such principles. The internationalization and continuous redefinition of societies are profoundly indebted to translation and communication. However, this fundamental role of translation is often ignored, because many of us keep using restrictive definitions of translation that exclude phenomena such as 'adaptation', 'imitation' and the like, or that necessarily reduce translation to complete texts, produced by individual writers and individual translators. The author also pleads for a widening of the source/target model because it reflects an outdated binary world view in which societies are assumed to be either one thing or the other. The reality of the internationalized world is often incompatible with the idea of binary oppositions in contact relations. In these contexts, translation behaviour is often correlated with power relations and political options and thus with issues of colonization and decolonization. Enlarging on these insights, the article (re)formulates the (translational) relations between cultures in terms of basic import/export rules that shed new light on power relations between cultures, between colonizers and the colonized.