The notion of a future, non-racial South Africa is generating a great deal of research and planning at all levels. An interesting, and most certainly very encouraging, aspect of these activities in our multilingual country is to be found in the wide-spread interest in the language question. The author argues that the language professions have a vital role to play in delegitimating linguistic inequality in a future democratic South Africa by considering the interface between language policy and the translation profession in South Africa.