Awareness that translation can provide operational terms and methodological tools for understanding the processes shaping today’s changing cultural realities is generally very low, even for school textbooks’ authors, teachers and parents. Drawing from the experience of the author as an academic teacher of translation and instructor for secondary school translation workshops the article discusses how translation could be used in school curricula. However, making translation and translators present at school will meet with systemic obstacles if there is not a wider presence of Translation Studies in teacher training programmes and university education in humanities. Paraphrasing Auden’s famous line, the author claims that “translation makes something happen” and that one of the aims of university courses in translation is to help future educators understand this truth.