The essay reports on a research project concerned with the translation movement of ninth and tenth-century Baghdad. Starting from the hypothesis that some form of translator training could be identified in that context, tentative parallels were drawn between the organization of translation work in medieval Baghdad and in the researcher's own environment, the Paris School of Interpreters and Translators (ESIT). These issues explored included text exegesis, target readership and functional and target-oriented translation, and reference was made to the wider context of the French tradition. The study of medieval Arabic historigraphies, and more crucially that of the translators' liminary writings and paratexts, raised other issues pertaining to the metalanguage of translation and to the complexity of the translation discourse, which belied widely accepted interpretations of the translation movement, as regards both the factors that promoted it and the responses to it.