The accumulation and ordering of facts is a very necessary task; it constitutes the archaeology at the basis of any history. If the facts are wrong, they should be corrected. Yet the task of translation history itself, to trace the trails of relations between cultures, requires more than raw data. Some principles of method, and debate about the same, may be in order. The following notes run through suggestions for two such principles. They have evolved from a series of case studies, mostly from the Hispanic past. As such, they cannot aspire to any universality of thought or application. Field-restricted, they might yet be of interest to those tilling similar soils.