The paper, which has been written from the point of view of a translator and a researcher, adopts a form that is not entirely academic. Opening with excerpts from three German-speaking writers (Yoko Tawada, Wolfgang Hilbig, Josef Winkler), it reflects briefly on the lack of practical consequences of environmentalist convictions for the practice of translation. Returning to the three authors mentioned, he then reflects on the break represented by the triple Fukushima disaster in Yoko Tawada’s work, and on the links between globality, ecology and translation.