In this paper, the author aims to explore the relationship between translation and politeness. To this end, she first discusses the sociocultural phenomenon of politeness and critically reviews a number of conceptualizations with a view to their applicability to Translation Studies. Second, she addresses the issue of cross-cultural and cross-linguistic differences in politeness norms; here she concentrates on the description and explanation of differences in German-English norms as they have emerged from the author’s own work. Third, she brings together politeness and translation by presenting a particular model of contextual translation analysis with which to demonstrate how equivalence of politeness can be achieved and assessed.