Collective Translation as training to the profession (?)

Can collective translation offer a valid training for would-be translators? After an overview of the theories and the ideas connected to translator training, the paper focuses on a first-hand experience of collective translation, used as an introduction to the practice of the profession and the mechanisms of a publishing house, in a 2011 postgraduate translation course whose final objective was translating a children’s novel for Salani Editore. The first issue underlined involves fragmentation: the novel was divided into 14 parts, a challenge in terms of uniformity and overall comprehension. The second issue involves the negotiation between student and trainer, which only partially reproduces the translator-reviser relationship in terms of trust and power balance. Is the communication between teacher and student(s) comparable to the one between a reviser and the translator? Is there the same balance of authority? The third aspect is negotiation among the students, which opens up to skills apparently distant from the usual, individual, translation work. The paper underlines the advantages and disadvantages of the experiment and proposes new alternative to complete the training for literary translators.