The eighteenth century saw not only the rise of encyclopaedias in the form of handbooks of articles arranged alphabetically, but also the spread of the genre across large parts of the European continent. Starting out in France, the Netherlands, the German-speaking area and England, encyclopaedias (in German: ‘Reallexika’ or ‘Sachwörterbücher’) such as the Cyclopaedia by Chambers or the Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert, soon also started appearing in Southern, Eastern and Northern Europe, before becoming part of the publishing landscape in North and South America in the late eighteenth century. Just as the creation of encyclopaedias was in many cases transnational, so too was their reception. Thus, encyclopaedias were a driving force in the formation of a pan-European and transatlantic space of knowledge and communication in the eighteenth century. Our research project, entitled ‘Dimensions of Translation in the Context of French Encyclopaedism in the Age of Enlightenment (1680–1800)’, which since 2018 has been part of the DFG Priority Programme 2130 “Early Modern Translation Cultures”, aims to examine the role that translations played in this context and for early modern encyclopaedism.