Over the last few decades, the English departments in many universities have, in the form of chairs, associations and series of publications, institutionalized not only American, but also, Scottish, Irish and Commonwealth Studies, the latter often being subdivided into areas such as Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, Caribbean, Indian, African - and here again often into East, West, South African - Studies. In the second half of the 1980s German universities have offered an average of 70 courses per semester in the area of NEL (New English Literatures), most frequently about Canada and Africa. (Cf. Lehmann 207) Each one of the geographical areas comprises a multitude of discrete linguistic variants more or less removed from Standard English. "English [...] is now seen less and less as a European language and an exclusive exponent of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and is instead viewed more as a language with multiple cultural identities and traditions." (Kachru 1986, VIII) The study of culture has also received new impulses from the emergence of the new literatures:

Not long ago literary history and literary criticism in a traditional sense were more or less confined to a concept of culture that stressed the idea of nationalism. And it is an intriguing fact that today this concept is losing its normative power at least for Western scholars working in the field of cultural research. (Harth 40)

How can these aspects be included in the linguistic and cultural education or training of translators and interpreters? Education means "to lead out of", the etymology of training leads us back to "trahere, to pull" and I think for us this implies leading, pulling students out of the convictions and judgements with which their own culture has imbued them and which they hold to be truths; the most forming experiences would be those that "blow one's mind", that most thoroughly challenge received ideas and prejudices and open one's mind to different concepts,