This chapter sketches the outlines of the prevailing, but conceptually trivial, sense of translation we might be tempted to press into service as a political concept. It describes a different sense of translation, with different futures as a political concept, that flows from the rise of so-called machine translation and which may already organize, and if not already may soon come to organize, the semantic field covered by the term “translation.” Finally, with the help of different sorts of machines entirely, or different sorts of mechanical entities, the chapter attempts to show how these two senses of “translation” should be thought in relation to one another, and then reworked into our understanding of the practices of translation we encounter today.