This article gives an account of the source-target opposition and attempts to provide an answer to the following question: are the social, cultural and institutional links between the constituents of such an intercultural entity strong enough to take it as the focal point of a this study? i.e. what is most useful: to see translators as functioning withing a target system which controls both production and reception of translations, or to see translators as functioning within an international system of text production and translation? In the main part of the paper the author discusses a case where the second alternative is most usefull, namely Reader's Digest, which is a mass medium spread all over the world and which production is centralized in the highest degree but happens in interaction with the local reception systems. The discussion does not go into the concrete translation and adaptation but is restricted to the role Digest plays in intercultural value transfer.