The purpose of this paper is to provide a practical tool for performing a shift operation in orthonormal compactly supported wavelet bases. This translation τ of a discrete sequence, where τ is a real number, is suitable for filter bank implementations. The shift operation in this realization is neither related to the analysis filters nor to the synthesis filters of the filter bank. Simulations were done on the Daubechis wavelets with 12 coefficients and on complex valued wavelets. For the latter ones a real input sequence was used and split up into two subsequences in order to gain computational efficiency.