In my presentation, I will discuss the ways in which various types of knowledge are translated in the process of providing services to sex workers in post-socialist Poland. The vocabulary of rights, community empowerment, decriminalization, and peer education has been an element of HIV programmes for sex workers globally. However, the process of translating these ideas into the work of service-providing NGOs in Poland in the early 2000s posed several challenges. In particular, the practices and ideas rooted in sex workers' rights mobilisations were difficult to translate in a context where the framing of 'sex work as work' was absent not only in harm reduction practice but also in the feminist or academic vocabulary. In addition, conservative values and the influence of the Catholic Church on social and health policies, such as restricting the use of condoms in prevention programmes, added another layer to this nexus. Drawing on my fieldwork with civil society actors involved in service provision and advocacy for sex workers, I will explore the outcomes of these processes and reconstruct how harm reduction and prevention programmes were translated into the Polish context.