This paper examines teaching ethnomusicology in a post-socialist East-Central European country as a situated practice marked by a constant effort of translation between languages, cultural and geopolitical histories, and academic traditions. This involves translation between English and a local language, but also between ethnomusicology as a ‘global’ Western academic discipline—whose theoretical discussions are largely shaped by postcolonial and decolonial discourses—and its ‘local’ practice in the transforming post-socialist (Ghodsee and Orenstein 2021), “white but not quite” (Kalmar 2022), semi-peripheral and disenchanted (Krastev and Holmes 2019) East-Central Europe, which occupies a precarious geopolitical position between others’ imperial and colonial aspirations (Feinberg 2024). Historically without colonies but sharing aspects of the colonial imagination towards the Global South (and sometimes their inner Others), and through their membership in (or candidate status for) the EU and NATO, these countries today experience their own “point zero of decolonization” (Barša 2020). Against this backdrop, I have had to negotiate my position as both a teacher and a translator of ethnomusicology at Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic, for more than a decade. To support Czech-speaking students, I translated Rice’s Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (published in Czech in 2020), and I initiated and serve as the main academic editor of the Czech translation of Rommen’s and Nettl’s Excursions in World Music, 8th edition (forthcoming). The paper offers grounded reflections on teaching and translating ethnomusicology as situated cultural practices and critiques epistemic schemes organizing ethnomusicological knowledge that sometimes lack nuance regarding the East-Central European situation and replicates Cold-War stereotypes.