Perhaps the most pressing environmental problem of our times is the availability of clean, safe water. Unsafe water due to contamination by pathogens is largely responsible for 2.2 million deaths every year, a staggering statistic. Aside from pathogens, another concern is chemical contamination, since much of the chemical pollution discharged from various sources (industry, agriculture, domestic activities, etc.) eventually end up in water. The widespread presence of persistent organic pollutants, persistent toxic substances, pharmaceuticals and personal care products (or contaminants of emerging concern), etc. in water systems represents the need to develop monitoring systems to detect and quantify these contaminants. In this talk, we shall be describing miniaturized sample preparation procedures for environmental aqueous matrices that use minimal solvents or reagents, which have been developed in our laboratory in the past several years. Being miniaturized, the methods also have the potential benefit of field or onsite applications. For environmental analysis, one approach is to carry out sample preparation in the field, with only the final extract being transported back to the laboratory for analysis. Another, more meaningful, but also more challenging, approach is to conduct all operations in the field. To borrow a term from the medical sciences, translational medicine (from the laboratory bench to the bedside), translational analytical chemistry, particularly in reference to environmental analysis, by our definition, refers to the conduct of sample preparation as well as analysis in the field, without needing to bring samples back to the laboratory for processing and analysis; in other words, bringing the laboratory to the field. We shall describe how with miniaturization, we can take the first step towards the automation of the sample preparation process, and when integrated with analysis (in this case, chromatography-mass spectrometry), a self-contained fully automated water quality monitoring system may be set up for field operations.