Recent advances in crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy have increased our current under-standing of the ribosome’s role in protein synthesis, the translation of the information encoded by messenger RNA code into a poly-peptide. Now in a technical tour de force, Jin-Der Wen et al. have used optical tweezers to follow the translation of a single mRNA by an E. coli ribosome one codon at a time. An mRNA (yellow on the cover) is tracked as it is unwound and translated. Translation, it turns out, is not a continuous process but occurs through successive translocation-and-pause cycles. Each cycle consists of a translocation step of three nucleotides in less than 0.1 s, then a pause of a few seconds. These are the first direct real-time observations of the physical steps of the ribosome machine along the mRNA during translation. The resulting single-molecule assay can address problems in translation not accessible using traditional bulk methods, including translational gene regulation and the fidelity of translation. [Article p. 598] Graphic by Laura Lancaster and Courtney Hodges, using Ribbons (Carson, 1997).