French version of Humpty Dumpty from Luis d’Antin van Rooten, Mots d’Heures, Gousses, Rames, Grossman, 1967.

Gibberish song from Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, 1936 courtesy of the Chaplin estate, Copyright © Roy Export S. A.S. All rights reserved.

From De La Grammatologie, Jacques Derrida, © Editions de Minuit; published in English as Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Letter from Estonian translator reproduced with the kind permission of Anti Saar.

Leonard Bloomfield from Leonard Bloomfield, Language, H. Holt & Co., 1933. P. 140.

Perec’s word-killer from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures. P. 341, © Georges Perec; published in the UK as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage. P. 287, 288, © David Bellos, Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; and in the USA as Life A User’s Manual New ed, 2009, David R. Godine publishers. P. 327, © David Bellos. P. 304

From War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, translated by Rosemary Edmonds, © Penguin Classics

Shunkouliu reproduced with the kind permission of Professor Perry Link, University of California at Riverside.

Asterix 1 © 2011 Les éditions Albert René / Goscinny-Uderzo.

Astertix 2 © 2011 Les éditions Albert René / Goscinny-Uderzo.

Israeli ‘Onegin stanza’ from Another Place, a Foreign City, by Maya Arad, copyright © by Xargol Books Ltd., Tel-Aviv, 2003; translated into English by Adriana Jacobs and reproduced with her kind permission.

Nabokov on translation from Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated and with a commentary by Vladimir Nabokov, Routledge, 1964. Vol. 1. P. vii — ix, © Princeton University Press.

Sybil from La Disparition, Georges Perec, 1969, Editions Denoël, in the translation, A Void, by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair, published by Harvill Press. P. 107, 108. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

Pete the Strangler from White Dog, Romain Gary, 1970. Reprinted courtesy of the author’s estate and The University of Chicago Press, 2004. P. 51.

The perfect language from From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East, Bernard Lewis, Oxford University Press, 2004, © of and reprinted with permission from The British Academy.

Japanese newspaper editorial translation reproduced with the kind permission of Professor Michael Emmerich.

Warren Weaver from Warren Weaver, ‘Translation’, in Machine Translation of Languages, by William N. Locke and A. D. Booth (eds.), published by The MIT Press.

FAHQT from ‘A Demonstration of the Nonfeasibility of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation’, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, (1960), in Language and Information — Selected Essays on their Theory and Application, Addison-Wesley Publ./Jerusalem Academic, 1964. P. 174.

Joke visiting card 1 from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures. P. 341, © Georges Perec; published in the UK as Life: A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage. P. 287, 288, © David Bellos. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; and in the USA as Life A User’s Manual New ed., 2009, David R. Godine publishers. P. 327, © David Bellos.

Joke visiting card 2 from La Vie mode d’emploi (ed. Magné), 1978, Hachette-Littératures. P. 341, © Georges Perec; published in the UK as Life A User’s Manual, 2008, Vintage. P. 287, 288, © David Bellos. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; and in the USA as Life A User’s Manual New ed, 2009, David R. Godine publishers. P. 327, © David Bellos.

Haikus from One Hundred Frogs: From Matsuo Basho to Allen Ginsberg, by Hiroaki Sato, 1995, Weatherhill, Shambhala Publications Inc., Boston, MA, © Allen 305 Ginsburg, © James Kirkup, and © Curtis Hidden Page.

Wordsworth pastiche by Catherine M. Fanshawe, extracted from The Faber Book of Parodies, Simon Brett (ed.), 1984, Faber & Faber.

T. S. Eliot pastiche from The Sweeniad, by Myra Buttle (aka Victor Purcell), Secker & Warburg, 1958. Extracted from The Faber Book of Parodies, Simon Brett (ed.), 1984, Faber & Faber.

J. D. Salinger pastiche from Adam & Eve & Stuff Like That, by Ed Berman. Extracted from The Faber Book of Parodies, Simon Brett (ed.), 1984, Faber & Faber.

53 Days from 53 Jours, Hachette-Littératures, 1989, © Georges Perec; published in the UK as 53 Days, by Georges Perec, translated by David Bellos, published by Harvill Press, 1994. P. 61. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd; and in the USA as 53 Days, David R. Godine publishers. P. 61 © David Bellos.