Consideration of current developments in cognitive science is indispensable when defining research agendas addressing cognitive aspects of translation. One such development is the recognition of the extended nature of human cognition: Cognition is not just an information manipulation process in the brain, it is contextualised action embedded in a body and increasingly mediated by technologies and situated in its socio-cultural environment. Parallel developments are found in neighbouring disciplines, such as sociology with its actor-network and activity theories. This paper examines these approaches, their shared methodological tenets (i.e., ethnographic field studies) and the implications of the situated cognition approach for describing the cognitive aspects of translation, using a translation management case study to discuss conceptual and methodological issues.