In a world that is increasingly globalized and in which language mediation is a growing professional sector, the development of new approaches to translator training and the optimization of the learning environments are critical to prepare translation learners to their future professional career. Moreover, modeling has become an increasingly popular teaching tool but has so far received little attention from translation scholars. The place given to as well as the whole idea of observational learning and its foundation in neuroscience shows many new research lines, which are too seldom addressed. This work delves deeply into different research traditions and disciplines and combines them to design and test an interdisciplinary approach to translation training, in the attempt to foster social modeling and enhance the acquisition of translation process-related competences. The integration of interdisciplinary concepts into translation research and the refinement of mixedmethod approaches to the study of translation constitute the main contribution of this work.