Gerard Delanty, in his conclusion to Citizenship in a Global Age, offers his own definition of the cosmopolitan moment:

The cosmopolitan moment occurs when context-bound cultures encounter each other and undergo transformation as a result. Only in this way can the twin pitfalls of the false universalism of liberalism's universalistic morality and the communitarian retreat into the particular be avoided.

                                                                                  (2000: 145)

The classic double bind is to be forced to choose between the false universality of a 'world culture' promised by more hegemonic varieties of globalization and the romanticism of the particular. For Delanty, what is indispensable for the emergence of a genuine cosmopolitanism is the encounter between cultures which are both determined by context and also have a capacity for transformation. By way of illustration of the necessary link between the micro-cosmopolitan and the transnational, and the macro-cosmopolitan and the transnational, we will mention briefly the translation history of two very different countries, Ireland and China, which occupy different ends of the scale in terms of territorial size and regional importance. Contrary to earlier practice in the field of translation studies, it is no longer possible to limit histories of translation to literary phenomena within the territorial boundaries of the nation-state; account must be taken of the multiple translation activities of a country's diaspora. It is in this sense that any history of translation must be a 'transnational' history rather than a 'national' history.

In the Irish case, it is possible to identify at least three moments in this transnational translation history. The first moment dating back to the early medieval period sees the involvement of the Irish in the reconstruction of the Carolingian educational system and in particular in the revival of instruction in Latin. The Irish, as speakers of a Celtic language markedly different from Latin, found that they were teaching Latin as a genuinely foreign language. Not only was Latin a foreign language for the Irish teachers, but it had also become a foreign language for many of their continental pupils as a result of the depredations of the invasions by nomadic tribes and the collapse of the Roman empire. The geographical spread of their activities, abetted by the marked nomadism of the Irish monks, meant that their cultural influence was experienced far from their home base in Ireland. Not surprisingly, this religious and pedagogic expansionism has translation consequences. The ninth century will see the emergence of a group of Irish translators – Johannes Scotus Eriugena, Sedulius Scotus and Martinus Hiberniensis – whose Greek– Latin translations will make a significant contribution to the Carolingian renaissance and the revival of neo-Platonism in Europe (Whitelock et al. 1982; Mackey 1994; Shiels and Wood 1989; Cronin 1996: 12–15). What is particularly striking in tracing translation activity is the constant traffic in texts, ideas and literary models between Irish monasteries, local powerhouses in a strongly decentralized country, and Irish monastic foundations in Britain and on the European continent.

The second moment in this transnational history occurs in the seventeenth century when the religious and political persecution of Irish Catholics leads to the establishment of a series of Irish colleges on the European continent. Irish-language translations are produced in Rome, Prague and Salamanca but it is Saint Anthony's College in Louvain, established in 1603, that becomes the most important site of translation activity. The acquisition of a printing press in 1611 to publish texts in Irish gave an added importance to the translation activity in Louvain as translations were hitherto largely produced and circulated in manuscript form which greatly increased the cost and limited the possibilities of distribution. Not only do the translations themselves demonstrate the engagement of scholars formed by native intellectual traditions with the ideological ferment of the Counter-Reformation but the very language used in them will ultimately influence the linguistic development of modern Irish (Ó Cléirigh 1985).

A third moment in this diasporic history of Irish translation emerges in the twentieth century and is principally the work of Irish modernists in exile such as Joyce, Beckett, Denis Devlin, Brian Coffey and Thomas McGreevy who will make translation an integral part of their specific transnational poetics (Shields 2000: 17–90). Another dimension of this diasporic experience, although much less studied, is the presence of the Irish as missionaries, pedagogues and linguists in colonial and postcolonial West Africa. Irish modernism would be, properly speaking, inconceivable without continued contact with the European continent but similarly the most remote village on the island had a contact either with North America or England /Scotland /Wales through emigration, or with Latin America and West and Southern Africa through the activity of the Church. Literature in the Irish and English languages bears ample witness to the nature and extent of these contacts and it is generally accepted that a territorially exclusivist nationalist historiography has often tended to disregard or minimize the importance of the diasporic. However, what a micro-cosmopolitan transnationalism is arguing for is not that place or identity be dissolved into a rootless geography of free-floating diasporic fragments but rather that we take transnational phenomena like translation in smaller nations such as Ireland to reinvest place with the full complexity of their micro-cosmopolitan connectedness.