The translator's invisibility has been identified by Lawrence Venuti as a major ethical dilemma facing contemporary practitioners of translation. The tendency, especially within English-language translations commissioned by commercial publishers, to efface the translator's labour through the promotion of ‘fluent’ translation techniques and unreflexive reading practices is symptomatic of an attitude that is, Venuti maintains, ‘imperialistic abroad and xenophobic at home’. Although Venuti's account of this trend begins in the seventeenth century, after which it becomes increasingly yoked to the demands of corporate capital, invisible translation is also of course a premodern phenomenon. The story of medieval Europe is a story of languages in contact, yet the precise mechanisms through which exchanges across linguistic frontiers were effected only come into focus intermittently in literature of the period. One text that famously draws attention to the problem of language difference while simultaneously effacing it is Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. First, the tale's protagonist, Custance, is married off to the sultan of Syria, following reports of her beauty by Roman merchants. This traffic in women, goods, power and knowledge takes place without any explicit acknowledgement of linguistic borders between sixth-century Syria and Rome. No mention here of an interpreter at the wedding, or fumbled linguistic exchanges between Custance's entourage and that of her husband-to-be.