The author focuses on modes of circulation that allow intellectual works to develop a presence on the world stage, and the role of translation in this process. He argues that cultural exchanges have a dynamic of their own, and that transnational cultural exchange is a largely autonomous field, with its own economic, political and symbolic configuration. The basis units of the world-system of translation are language groups rather than nation-states, and the aim here is therefore to analyze the structure of translation flows between these language groups. Existing sources of data for conducting this analysis, for example book statistics available in each country and databases such as the Index translationum, are all flawed; the answer may be to cautiously combine international and national translation statistics as well as the findings of case studies where these are available. The starting assumption is that a language is more central in the world-system of translation when it has a large share in the total number of translated books worldwide, bearing in mind that the system itself is dynamic and that this position therefore changes over time.