Cultural transfer is a swiftly expanding concept in the humanities, yet little research has addressed its compliance with specific disciplinary requirements or its interactions with adjacent concepts in disciplines such as translation studies. This contribution makes a plea for a renewed alliance between the concepts of cultural transfer and translation. Transfer is understood here as an umbrella concept based on Gideon Toury's concept of assumed translation, and more precisely as a tool for the historical study of large sets of correlated discursive and institutional transfer techniques (including translation). The author focuses on a number of methodological aspects, offering firstly a discussion of the issues raised by linking the concepts of transfer and translation, and secondly a brief illustrative account of the roles of agents and of institutional and discursive transfer techniques during the construction phase of nineteenth-century Belgian literature, followed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of intracultural Flemish–French translations.