In a multilingual Europe, professional translation is indispensable to enable communication across languages. To perform well in their profession, which consists of translating complex and specialized content into a different language, professional translators must undergo a high-quality training. Assuring quality in translator training requires that curricula are practice-oriented and that learning methods are continually further developed through the integration of knowledge that is relevant to learning processes and the acquisition of translation competence. This paper outlines the central aspects of the learning process, as an active constructive, social, emotional and situated process, and sets them in relation to the fields that have, to date, mainly inspired translator training, such as psycholinguistics or expertise research. It comes to the conclusion that communicative and emotional aspects of the translation classroom deserve more attention in the training of professional translators and could help develop a more situated view of the acquisition of translation competence.