Intended as an interrogation and a critique that can serve to prompt a more thorough and open consideration of evaluative criteria, this special issue of The Translator offers examinations of diverse evaluative practices and contains both empirical and hermeneutic work. Topics addressed include the evaluation of student translations using more up-to-date and positive methods such as those employed in corpus studies; the translation of non-standard language; translation into the second language; terminology; the application of theoretical criteria to practice; a social-textual perspective; and the reviewing of literary translations in the press. In addition, reviews by a number of literary translators discuss specific translations both into and out of English.