Translator training has been a much researched applied activity of Translation Studies in recent years, as amply testified by the growing number of publications in the field, widely ranging from handbooks for translator trainers (e.g. González Davies 2004; Kelly 2005) and practical courses in translation (e.g. Hervey et al. 2000; Laviosa 2005) to scholarly volumes (e.g. Colina 2003; Robinson 2003; Nord 2005; Tennent ed. 2005) and academic journals, such as The Interpreter and Translator Trainer and The Sign Language Translator and Interpreter (see Kelly 2005 for an up-to-date bibliography). Essentially interdisciplinary, these works explicitly bring together reflections derived from the "Pure" branches of Translation Studies and a host of neighbouring disciplines and areas of scientific enquiry, namely Linguistics, Education, Second Language Acquisition, Second and Foreign Language Learning, and Language Teaching Methodology.

Equally impressive is the literature on corpus-based translator training, ranging from practical guides on how to use corpora in the LSP classroom (e.g. Bowker and Pearson 2002) to scholarly volumes that examine and illustrate the use of corpora for pedagogic purposes (e.g. Botley et al. eds. 2000; Hatim 2001; Granger et al. eds. 2003; Zanettin et al. eds. 2003; Gavioli 2005). These works too are interdisciplinary; they draw on the theoretical and descriptive branches of Translation Studies, translation aids, and neighbouring disciplines and areas of scholarly research such as Corpus Linguistics, Information and Communication Technologies, Computational Linguistics, Machine (Assisted) Translation, Contrastive Linguistics, Terminology, Lexicography, and LSP studies. Some of these studies have been carried out by descriptive translation scholars who also teach ESP and specialized translation. They show a very close relationship between description and application. Students engage with corpus data in a systematic way using a methodology based on the principles of Data-Driven Learning put forward by Tim Johns (1991a, 1991b) in foreign-language teaching. This involves carrying out small-scale research projects where students identify problem areas arising from translation practice, suggest restricted descriptive hypotheses based on a comparative research model, and then test them together with their tutor, who has the role of facilitator in the learning process. In this particular teaching context, corpus design and compilation, as well as processing tools and procedural steps, are very similar to those employed in corpus-based descriptive research, although the aims are specifically pedagogic. Small, specialized corpora are designed and used not only as resources for retrieving translation equivalents, particularly in terminological work, but also as repositories of data for improving students' understanding of actual translational and linguistic behaviour, so that norms can be accepted (or refuted as the case may be) in a more conscious way on the basis of bridging rules grounded in reality.

More recently, translator trainers working in the field of LSP studies have drawn on the insights of descriptive research into translation universals. The insights have beentaken as “a basis for conscious manipulation” (Toury 1995: 273) in experimental studies aimed at testing in the classroom environment the validity of a number of universals, their usefulness in raising student awareness about translation and translating, and their possible use as predictors of higher or lower quality translations. What follows is a review of some very recent works, which may well represent the beginning of a new trend in the applied extensions of Translation Studies.