Similar to other fields, Middle East Studies are at a stage where scholars have begun to reexamine their efforts within the framework of the modern university and science in general, with regard to both research and teaching. It is being realized that for a long time these studies have been directed towards area specialization and self-perpetration while efforts at keeping up the communication with other fields of scholarship and, more important perhaps, with the disciplinary approaches and theories that are or ought to be applied in Near Eastern studies have been very much neglected. Communication of our field with other fields and with the various disciplines is invariable dependent on translation from translations of individual pieces of literature to ‘translations’ of the entire field and the range of problems related to it. Translators from one European language into another can rely on a vast amount of secondary data and a general knowledge of the overlapping cultural settings. Translators of Middle Eastern literary output have first to overcome a basic public ignorance about the area on, or, if not ignorance, then a view and presupposition that our field is still largely exotic. There is moreover little expectation on the side of non-specialists that the literary output of the Middle East can have any wider impact on or be of any importance for the various humanistic or social disciplines and comparative studies.