Vocational translation training into a foreign language

The training of professionally-oriented translation into a foreign language is an under-researched area of translation studies, perhaps hampered firstly by the traditional association between translation into a foreign language and pedagogical translation, and secondly by a persistent acceptance of time-honoured methodologies in the translation classroom. This article is in part an attempt to redress the balance, to consider vocational translation training into the foreign language in terms of classroom strategies, text typology, textbooks and language / information resources, and to reflect upon how these might differ from the criteria involved in training translation into a native language. Particular attention will be devoted to the issue of directionality in the classroom, i.e., should the trainer ideally be a native speaker of the source or the target language? The final part of the article discusses how classroom directionality is affected by the presence of foreign-language (e.g., Erasmus) students.