As moves to intensify the professionalisation of translation have progressed, on of the issues which has arisen is that of translation direction in relation to native or non-native speaker competence. In other words, is it good professional practice to translate out of as well as into your mother tongue? In this article the author makes some assumptions associated with this question explicit and puts it into a context which takes account of a number of translational factors. In the first section, the notion of native speaker competence is discussed, followed by a consideration of translation competence in the context of UK higher education and its relevance to native speaker and non-native speaker translators. Some data are then presented in the form of a case study of the translations of two native speakers of English and two native speakers of German working from German into English.