The questions raised for Chaucer the translator are often misformed or misdirected: why does 'lyte Lowys' not figure more prominently in the Astrolabe, why does the Boece contain so many glosses, why is the Melibee so long, and why are Chaucer's prose translations so tedious to modern readers when his original poetry is so entertaining? The author of this article considers such questions as misformed or misdirected because they really ask why Chaucer's translations weren't something entirely different, lie beast fables or love poems, or because they fail to place the translations within the cultural, linguistic and literary contexts which embrace them. The intention of this paper is to situate Chaucer as translator in some of these contexts and to show that Chaucer's translations are in fact central to his theory and practice of writing. The author begins with Chaucer's own attitudes toward translation and then passes to what the translations reveal about Chaucer the writer, which is the main focus of this paper.