In this chapter, the author starts out by charting the provenance of current studies on universals in the earlier Translation Studies literature. As she point out, however, the topic has not been uncontroversial. She reminds us of the useful distinction – first established in typological studies of languages – between absolute universals and general tendencies, the latter currently presenting the more promising path. Before moving on to a discussion of each of what she cautiously calls the hypothesized translation universals, the author reviews some of the methods used to study these empirically. The universals that she succinctly surveys are: expliciation, simplification, conventionalization, unique items in translation (“under-representation”), interference and untypical collocations.