Whilst transversal and transoceanic theoretical frameworks have emerged from various academic spheres in the last decades and paved the way to rich and varied (non-)Western modalities of understanding and re-assessing postcolonial literatures, when it comes to the scrutiny of the actual circulation and diffusion of so-called ‘minor’ literatures, particularly in translation, little has been done beyond strictly textual analyses or national, at times regional, approaches to publishing strategies. This paper aims to initiate a dialogue between transversal models of circulation observed in the context of Indian Ocean and Caribbean literatures. It will investigate (trans)local publishing initiatives in an attempt to signal alternative pathways to a planetary ecosystem that chiefly relies on a ‘capitalist world-ecology’ (Campbell & Niblett, 2016) and will focus, instead, on archipelagic modes of literary circulation. To do so, the paper will present data collected from in-situ research conducted with publishers, writers and (self-)translators based in the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. Seeking to show how publishing initiatives articulated around island ecologies can help us rethink book markets in terms of ecotones, this contribution will ultimately address the question of translation, conceived as an inter/tralinguistic practice as well as a series of archipelagic crossings, to see whether new coordinates can be generated for sustainable transoceanic solidarities. Glissant’s notion of the ‘inter-dit’ in particular will be helpful to gauge the extent to which Indian Ocean and Caribbean multilingual realities can be transmitted and altogether preserved, originating as they do in fragile environments subject to contingencies and colonial legacies.