The language industry differentiates between translation, localisation and transcreation as distinct activities. Nevertheless, many professional translators are engaged in localisation and transcreation projects, which raises the question of the role of translation in these multilingual language services. The purpose of this paper is to provide an answer to this question from the perspective of FIT, as the representative of professional translators on the world stage. The first section introduces the term conventional translation and presents FIT’s position, which is that translation is the backbone of all multilingual language services that involve source text and corresponding target text. The second section consists of definitions of four multilingual activities (translation, conventional translation, localisation and transcreation). The third section features a diagram about these activities and a brief description of the diagram, to complement Sections 1 and 2. The scope of this paper is multilingual language service activities that involve humans. Therefore, unedited machine translation (UEMT), sometimes called raw machine translation, which is pervasive in today's society, is not treated here.