This article brings together insights from translation studies, book history and technology studies in order to examine translation in the media contexts of oral, scribal, print and screen culture. The shift between these cultures has arguably been the result of diverse technological innovations, with each altering the ways in which the spoken/written word came to be recorded and received. As a result, practices of writing and reading have varied historically in accordance with the material carriers available for the storage and retrieval of information. If media technologies (from the human body to the computer) make a difference to practices of writing and reading, as historians of the book have demonstrated, then surely the same technologies have also made a difference to practices of translation. I therefore ask what role media technology has played in the history of translation, and what kinds of practices of translation can be associated with different media cultures.