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Abstract
There has been a number of discussions on the methods by which translation and interpreting should be taught in Turkish universities since 1980s; a period when the departments of Translation and Interpreting started being established. As the number of the departments increased, accordingly the content of discussions and research on training enhanced. When the curricula of these departments are examined, it becomes obvious that they all have various, often different methods to train their students. Discussions on the subject cover topics such as curriculum and syllabus design which increasingly have become of great interest for many researchers. Considering the close relationship between the subject areas of the special fields of translation such as economics, law, medicine, literature, engineering etc., the need of incorporating certain aspects of such areas into translation training programs becomes evident. Thus, developing knowledge and awareness on those special fields becomes embedded in translation competence which covers competence in language, culture, text analysis, research, etc. The aim of this paper is to concentrate on the methods in which academic training programs of specialized translation, particularly in legal translation training, should be designed so that a functional way of teaching/training could be achieved through a concept of translation competence. In order to do so, we will focus on the curriculum of "Translation of Legal Texts" module at Yaar University. The theoretical framework of our paper is based on one of the key concepts of the translation studies which is "function". In this context, we will also examine the widely used term "specialist" (or rather being/becoming a specialist translator) and some misconceptions that seem to result from the blurry understanding of the term in question. Therefore, we aim to pinpoint certain "problem zones" that hinder a functional teaching / training process and we intend to come up with plausible alternative suggestions that could hopefully help have a clearer idea as to how to design appropriate modules in translation departments, also create more realistic expectations about legal translation training among students. We will also look at the ways through which students could obtain the translation-relevant knowledge of the given subject area more efficiently and gain awareness of internal and external contexts of a given text, special field related text types, registers and terminology...