Moving away from the dichotomy of the empirical/descriptive vs. postmodernist cultural/textual paradigms within Translation Studies, the article compares and contrasts three different approaches to both the study and the teaching of translation, i.e. the linguist’s, the professional translator’s and the translation scholar’s, and introduces in the latter the further distinction of a Descriptive vs. a Prescriptive approach to a university-level pedagogy of specialist translation. The ‘activist’ perspective on translation pedagogy and research advocated in the article is based on corpus-based contrastive linguistics, integrates the applied and the theoretical components of Translation Studies and involves a teaching methodology where translation is seen as a professional problem-solving activity where a certain degree of normativeness is seen as inevitable.