Translator training institutions are shooting up like mushrooms all over the world, and even in the ordinary language classroom (e.g., at culture institutions like the British Council, Institut Français, Goethe-Institut or Instituto Cervantes) students are demanding some sort of basic training in (professional) translation. The problem is: Who is going to do the teaching? So far, there is no institutional training for translator trainers. Teachers of Mathematics or Philosophy are trained in their respective Faculties, Language Teachers are trained in Modern Language Departments or Faculties of Second Language Acquisition, but persons applying for a position as translator trainer in a Faculty of Translation and Interpreting need no particular formal qualification, and if they needed one, they would not know where to get it. This does not mean that they are all bad translator trainers, but maybe life would be a little easier for them (and for their students?) if they had had some kind of special instruction and were not forced to re-invent the wheel of translation pedagogy over and over again.
