Translation Studies covers an increasingly wide range of phenomena. This can be seen in recent conference proceedings, the variety of topics treated in leading journals, tertiary sources like encyclopedias and collections of classic texts, and introductory textbooks. The field is actually an interdiscipline, and is marked by considerable methodological variation. There are also disagreements about whether the field is basically a hermeneutic one, an applied one, or a human science. However, there are some signs that a shared paradigm is emerging, based on shared general goals. The emerging conceptual framework seems to comprise four distinct levels: linguistic, cognitive, situational, and socio-cultural.