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Evidence from several translation market surveys suggests that many students of translation may not be receiving adequate training, particularly in the personal and inter-personal skills that they will need upon graduation in the rapidly changing field of language mediation. This article investigates the multi-cluster na-ture of ‘translator competence’ and its implications for a multi-facetted approach to translator education. In drawing upon recent work involving the application of com-plexity theory to educational issues, the article moves beyond neo-Vygotskian social constructivism as the key guiding principle for translator education. Complexity the-ory is used to show how a principled combination of transmissionist, transactional and transformational teaching approaches might be more effective than any one approach alone.

This special issue is devoted to training translator trainers, a remarkably neglected field of inquiry given the strong interest shown in translation pedagogy since translation studies first emerged as a discipline. The very term 'trainer' belies the complexity of roles and demands that these educators have to fulfil, some of which is captured in the range and depth of the articles contained in this issue. The first three contributions span the synergetic potential of practical, research-oriented and pedagogical skills in translator educators' competence profiles, mismatches between educators' beliefs and practices, and how learning, teaching and doing research can be combined to enhance self-efficacy beliefs. They are followed by five case studies which describe and investigate teaching practices designed to develop students' assessment, digital and information literacy as well as their multimodal audiodescription and audiovisual translation skills. By presenting practices that educators might wish to emulate or adapt to their own institutional realities, the contributions to this issue reflect past approaches to educating the educators; but they also represent a decisive first step towards broadening and deepening the sporadic work previously done on what translator educators (should) do, how they (should) teach and how they (should) develop.

For the past thirty years, as the translator’s profession has undergone a radical metamorphosis from a sort of bilingual craft to a highly technologized profession, translator education has been undergoing a comparatively slow evolution. From pervasive chalk-and-talk transmissionist practice just a few decades ago, the contemporary literature on translator education reveals a plethora of theoretical and practical approaches to the study and teaching of translation-related skills. In this article, the author reviews some key trends in this development within the translator education domain on the basis of his own evolution as a translator educator over the past three decades. A key focus will be placed on the role of epistemology, a mainstay of educational philosophy and learning theory, but a topic that he feels can help elucidate pedagogical practices of the past and guide the way toward ones better suited to educating translators today … and in the future.

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