The proposed collective work is devoted to the most important cultural phenomena - translation and imitation, which were of great importance in the history of medieval and Renaissance European literature. The variety of medieval translations was due to the heterogeneity of medieval society and the presence of different components of medieval translation theory, based on the doctrine of imitation of ancient authors inherited from antiquity, within the framework of which translation was considered as one of the types of imitation, and on the reflection of church writers on the literal translation and its special appropriateness in the transmission of sacred texts, and on the considerations of translators about the "transfer" of a particular monument to a new literary environment.