The proliferation of translation studies from the second half of the twentieth century until now has produced a multitude of approaches, models, concepts and terms. Translation studies has become a labyrinth of ideas and findings in which it is hard to find one’s way and about which explicit consensus has been formulated fairly rarely. However, within the framework of the Bologna-agreement, European Union institutions are now obliged to work towards transparency and mutual recognition of degrees, a fact that stimulates translation studies to reflect on its own status. Recent surveys of the field’s contents can be found in Baker (1998a), the “Bibliography of Translation Studies” (1998-), Williams and Chesterman (2002) and the “EST-Directory 2003.” These overviews are very incongruent, however: the few subdivisions of types of translation studies areas that are marked clearly differ from one another, and, taken together, these contributions result in a collection of fairly long lists of translation studies approaches that lack a consistent basis. Consequently, one still turns to Holmes’s map of translation studies to build some coherence into the complex collection of theories and findings about translation. The present article explains why Holmes’s map is inadequate for this purpose, outlines its shortcomings and develops an alternative.