This article is an invitation to travel, to follow the trail of translators on their exploration of foreign cultures. It deals with several quite different periods, languages, genres and cultural situations. The author proposes to meander through the past, evoking the diverse functions that translators have performed through history. The paper offers eight excursions. Some of the issues discussed include twelfth-century Spain and nineteenth-century Paris, the period extending from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries, when Christian Europe came into contact with the Islamic Orient, Elizabethan England, French Revolutionary times, the Gothic period, science fiction in the 1950s and other topics. This voyage through time provides an opportunity to explore the as-yet uncharted places and eras of translation history; its aim is to reveal what translators have achieved – their work and its effects.