Dead languages like Old Irish represent a limiting case for the construction of a comprehensive theory of translation. Because no living linguistic environment remains, ascertaining the meaning of texts in a dead language is problematic, raising in a radical fashion the question of indeterminacy of translation. In such texts meaning is established with reference to other languages, through translation itself, revealing translation again to be an epistemological process where translation precedes understanding rather than the inverse as is generally theorized. Nonetheless, it is argued that translation is no more indeterminate than other forms of knowledge, including the scientific disciplines. The chapter examines the imperialistic presuppositions of Quine's famous indeterminacy argument, showing that seemingly abstract considerations of the translatability of early Irish literature into English shed light on cultural transfer from subaltern groups and colonized cultures as a whole.