Studies of global university rankings often assume that rankings as Anglo-American policy scripts have an increasing influence resulting in a convergence of policies and practices, or that the ideas of rankings continue to diverge into national types. In this article, we take a middle ground by arguing that when an idea of ranking is grounded in a particular place, it takes on hybrid forms because of individual agency and of national and local contingencies that are found at that place. A key concept is "a frictional translation", by which we refer to more than one way in which capable actors can interpret and translate the idea of ranking within a given geographical and organizational context. We use university mergers in Finland as an example of the translation process, in which global university rankings are interpreted through nationally and locally specific assemblages of institutional forms that support, resist or hybridize them.