Based on Schleiermacher's and Derrida's concepts, the introduction to Dialoge von Zeit zu Zeit. Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit und Übersetzung outlines various types of dialogue-based research into literary multilingualism and translation in the modern age. The contributions in this special issue discuss the political, historical, economic, aesthetic and poetological implications of working with (increasingly) multilingual texts from a historical and systematic perspective and argue for an appropriately modified vocabulary of description and analysis.