Professional non-literary translation in contemporary Europe may be understood as a coherent alternative to interlocutors using languages in which they have deficient or non-natural competence. Such translation can thus be seen as inscribing an ideology of non-hybridity. This is because macrostructural translated texts mark out lines between at last two languages and cultures; they thus posit the separation and possible purity of both; this in turn supports the ideal of pure or natural language use. If such imagined purity is some kind of opposite of hybrids, then translations might help rather than hinder it. This general argument can be unsheathed from a picture in a twelfthcentury translation of the Qur'an, a close reading of Horace, a wink at Schleiermacher, and twinkling Euro-English from an EU meeting on business statistics regulations.