The main concern of this article is the teaching of specialist translators and facilitating learning by making students aware of the cognitive and mental processes of specialized translation. From the author’s own experience, the acquisition of translation competence can be enhanced by incorporating the vertical axis of complexity and the horizontal axis of specialization into translation teaching for the purpose of analyzing, processing and generating special-purpose texts. The main factors to be taken into account on the vertical axis include the frequency of technical terms (usually coupled with an adverse number of cultural specifics), the receiver’s knowledge of the subject-matter, as well as the sender’s knowledge of the subject matter and the purpose of the translation. The horizontal axis of specialization provides an indication of the linguistic and textual features of special-purpose texts, such as the dominance of technical terms, nominalization, a high degree of objectivity, impersonal style, concision and frequent use of collocations with the German verbs bringen, kommen, geben, machen (Funktionsverbgefüge). The author’s examples are mainly from product advertisement and medical texts in German, English and French.