They only come together during the process of translation as we'll see in just a moment and the purpose of our ribosome. So basically the large and the small subunit combined to form the ribosome. And the purpose of the ribosome is to basically translate the sequence of nucleotides into the proper sequence of amino acids. And this is exactly what we mean by translation. So the ribosome is basically translate the language of the mRNA into the language of our protein and thereby synthesize our proteins by using our genetic code. Now, our process of translation can be broken down into three stages.