This paper explores the way in which foreign museum visitors experience and reconstruct cultural identities through the museum text. It examines in particular how translations at one semiotic level ― the linguistic or 'verbal' ― influence interpretation of the broader museum text system as a whole, and draws on examples of Chinese/English museum exhibit captions and text-panels as a basis for discussion. It focuses on the contemporary museums sector in the People’s Republic of China as an example in which a range of issues are particularly acutely focused. These include the extent to which partial or inadequate translation may lead to cultural misinterpretation and misreading; the way that bilingual materials are used differently by source and target culture visitors in relation to the visual and spatial dimensions of meaning; and the presence of curatorial or ideological manipulation in the production of museum translations.