This essay has two aims: to present a general survey of translating in early modern Europe and to discuss translation between languages in a context of translation between cultures. Differences between cultures as well as languages reduce what has been called “translatability” of texts. A major problem for anyone translating comic literature, for instance, is that the sense or sense of humour of different cultures, “cultures of laughter”, as they have been called, are very different. Jokes fail to cross frontiers. In similar fashion they often go stale over the centuries or become unintelligible, like the references to the horns of husbands in Shakespeare, which may have had Elizabethan audiences rolling in the aisles of the Globe, but are greeted with silence today.