A good Chinese-English (C-E) translation coursebook should take into account both the students’ English proficiency and the essential problems in the teaching. In the current situation, the students’ English proficiency is far from satisfactory and the time to teach is limited. Thus, we suggest two principles in writing C-E translation coursebooks: the principle of systematicity and the principle of linking. In the principle of systematicity we detail the translation theories, skills and knowledge on the four levels of lexis, simple sentence, complex sentence and text, and hold that the teaching of skills, which are the connection between theories and knowledge, is the focus. In the principle of linking, we showcase the building of twelve related corpora in light of knowledge chunks and the students’ cognitive features, and suggest linking them to the website of the course or the coursebook. Such a teaching system ensures that the students will most effectively achieve C-E translation competence in the shortest time.