Hybridness is an important but by no means the defining feature of a translation. Affecting passages or whole texts, it is functionally related to a spectrum of causes varying from individual to historical and social motivations. It is also bound up with the formative role translations have played in communicative communities. The historical variability and the multiple uses of translation have continually re-valued the strategies which translators have applied to produce target texts on a scale ranging from hybridness, often regarded as a deficiency, to originality and creativity lending the target version a new life of its own in a new cultural context. The concept of hybridness could serve its purpose if it were taken as just one option in a new research paradigm that looks at the uses and shapes of translation in history. It studies translation events as they arise in a particular time and place and function as agents in the course of history.