This chapter focuses on two main questions: In what sense is ‘translation’ a metaphor for ‘modernity’, and conversely, how was the notion of ‘translation’ impacted by ‘modernity’? The chapter sets out with a brief discussion of the ambivalences of the two concepts, followed by Antoine Berman’s (TTR 1 (1): 23–40, 1988, The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany, State University of New York, 1992) description of the emergence of a new concept of translation at the beginning of modernity and Naoki Sakai’s (Translation and Subjectivity. On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism, University of Minnesota Press, 1999, The Eighteenth Century 58 (1): 105–108, 2017) notion of a ‘modern regime of translation’ based on the constitution of self-contained national territories and national languages. The second part of the chapter reinterprets Shmuel N. Eisenstadt’s (Daedalus 129 (1): 1–29, 2000) notion of multiple modernities in terms of translation. The final section discusses Michel Serres’s (Hermes III: La Traduction, Les Éditions de Minuit, 1997, Statues: The Second Book of Foundations, Bloomsbury, 2014) critical view of modernity as a radical rupture with the past, and the specific concept of translation that goes with it. Whereas Berman and Eisenstadt do not question modernity as a fundamental rupture in history, Sakai and Serres emphasize the importance of a vision that can do without radical ruptures, especially the one between a supposed pre-modern past and a modern present age. This vision of a fundamental historical continuity is expressed in Serres’s metaphors of stitching and the missing hyphens.