This paper discusses the construction of translation courses in terms of the basic idea, model and method of teaching, with the course of Chinese-English translation of East China Normal University as an example. It is proposed that translation courses should adopt a student-centered teaching model with an emphasis on the process rather than the result of translation. This is then illustrated with the reform of the translation course conducted by the authors, who have made tremendous efforts to turn the traditional translation classroom into a workshop. In this process students’ translation ability, as well as their English competence, has developed through the discussion of various types of texts from the perspective of contrastive analysis.