Abstract This article addresses a question central for this special issue of Multilingua on audiovisual translation (AVT) – of the relationship between the cross-cultural and the intercultural in audiovisual translation. The question underpins fundamental debates in the emergent field of AVT as cross/intercultural mediation, the focus in this volume, with subtitling and dubbing the two main interlingual modes considered in its pages from an interdisciplinary perspective embracing translation and audiovisual translation studies, pragmatics and cross-cultural pragmatics and film studies. The article doubles up as the introduction for the special issue, and provides its rationale and contents.