Engaged in the development of a new Translation Studies curriculum, the authors were faced with the problem of delimiting the field of study. In order to offer graduates the best possible job perspectives, it was decided to emphasize ‘translation for specific purposes’ as opposed to literary translation, dealing with legal, economic, scientific, technical and socio-cultural texts. A reasonable enough choice, given that only some five percent of translators in the Netherlands work in the literary field. The underlying assumption was that this division between two types of translators corresponded with a clear-cut distinction between literary and non-literary translation. In this article the authors demonstrate that the perception of translation types as a continuum is plausible, and the illustrate how one translational phenomenon – cultural difference – is unable to distinguish literary translation from non-literary, or the translation of texts for specific purposes. The argument is restricted to translation proper, no attempt is made to prove or disprove any principled distinctions between literary and non-literary texts in a single language.