This book is a dialogue between a theoretical scholar and a professional translator, about the usefulness (if any) of translation theory. Andrew Chesterman and Emma Wagner argue about the problem of the translator's identity, the history of the translator's role, the translator's visibility, translation types and strategies, translation quality, ethics, and translation aids. Chapter 1 addresses the aims of theory, the needs of translators and the role of conceptual tools. In Chapter 2, the authors debate issues of identity, metaphors of translation and translation history. Chapter 3 covers visibility, authors and professional status. Chapter 4 deals with the classification of purposes, types and readerships, and Chapter 5 with strategies, unblocking, distancing, and motivating. The following chapter focuses on issues of quality assessment, standards and norms, and the final chapter with translation aids, machine translation and translation memory.