The training of translators has been one of the most crucial research interests of scholars devoted to the development of Translation Studies as a discipline in its own right. The main goal of this chapter is to examine the ways in which some of the approaches of Translation Studies implicitly and explicitly treat translation as a profession. In other words, into what kind of professional image will aspiring translators be able to reflect themselves as they try to learn their skills, and what kind of professional attitude and ethetics do existing theories and conceptions of translation end up teaching them? The object of analysis are three books which can be linked to a predominantly essentialist theoretical foundation: Baker's In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation, Kussmaul's Training the Translator and Hatim and Mason's The Translator as Communicator. The author concentrates on some of their valuable arguments and reflects on how they could be incorporated into an approach to teaching which would fully accept the far-reaching implications of the inevitably ideological basis of the translator's task.