In L’histoire à  parts égales: récits d’une rencontre Orient-Occident, Romain Bertrand focuses on “first contacts” between the Dutch, the Malay and the Javanese, from the late seventeenth century to the 1630’s. Following in the footsteps of connected history, “Subaltern Studies” and sociology of scientific knowledge, Bertrand argues for the possibility of writing a fruitful “symmetric” history, an account “in equal parts” which relies on Dutch, British and Portuguese texts on the one hand, and Javanese and Malay documents on the other. This article aims at stressing the heuristic and methodological issues raised in that important book, especially the detailed study of the devices and scales of commensurability as keys for understanding diplomatic and mercantile encounters in the Early modern period. Hence, L’histoire à  parts égalesoffers a valuable argument in support of a “thick translation” preserving the peculiarity of vernacular statements and regimes of historicity, while avoiding the binary and schematic rhetoric of absolute “otherness,” often used to describe imperial encounters.