Theoretical, methodological and political fundamentals of a passive, weak, humble model of (descriptive) translatology are displayed. The author first assumes that strong paradigms cannot respond to the complexity of reality. Then the author tries to place descriptive translatology in the frame of philology (as understood within the Greek-Latin tradition), and to fill the gap between scholarly approaches and actual professional practice. Key-concepts are: theoretical eclecticism, ‘practitionery' (instead of pragmatism), deontological (instead of utilitarian) ethics and, above all, the recognition of (sacred?) values in any word, text and language.