Anyone wishing to tackle translations for any scholarly purpose is faced with the delimitation of the object of study: How is one to know what to take up and what to leave out? The current state of Translation Studies (henceforth: TS) makes this a tough question indeed to answer in a way which would be acceptable to one and all. Not only does today’s discipline constitute a hotchpotch of (more or less fragmentary) paradigms, but there still reigns a tendency to regard essentially different approaches as mere alternative ways of dealing with ‘the same thing’. Which they are not, nor should they be expected to be. Far from being a neutral issue, the object of study is perforce a function of the theory in whose terms it is constituted; and every theoretical paradigm is geared to cater for needs of its own, which may easily be different from those of any other paradigm. One question of far-reaching methodological implications is, how much previous knowledge should one claim to have, when doing research. As the title of this contribution implies, the answer would be that we should exercise some modesty and admit that all we can purport to do is tackle texts and acts, or events, which we assume (rather than ‘know’) to be translational.