Lianeri’s reading of a seminal essay by the German Romantic philosopher and translator, Friedrich Schleiermacher, demonstrates the significance of translation concepts in both modern and postmodern culture, and suggests the importance of translation for contemporary ethical and political agendas. Translation played a crucial role in the epistemic shift that took place in the early nineteenth-century Germany that saw Enlightenment universalism modified by cultural diversity and pluralism. Culture came to be defined as a process of realising oneself through one’s encounters with the other: through a process of translation. According to Lianeri, the Romantic theories of translation expanded the concept of (un)translatability into a hermeneutics of interpretation with the power to effect radical changes in the meaning of the very term ‘culture’.