Translation ??? Linguistic ???

I'm a student of University Science Malaysia and majoring in Translation and Interpretation.
I bet you'll ask me the same question once heard my major courses such as "What languages you have learned in this course?"
Normally, people will automatically relate the word "translation" with "languages".
I'm not going to contradicting the relationship of these two words, but what I want to make it clearly expressed is there are differences between "translation" and "languages" in my course.
University Science Malaysia is the only local university which have offered this course.
I'm not sure whether the private university have offered or not. But, I'm not promoting my course at this moment. Haha...
For your information, this course is study about the translation skills include method of translation, the culture of source text and target text and etc.
The most challenging part is interpretation part. Why?
Have you ever imagine that you are sitting beside the president of America and the president of China in order to interpret their conversation ? Sounds great right...
BUT... IF you interpret the wrong information to that 'big person'... you are in deep water over the mistake you have done...
Back to the "translation" and "languages", what I want to mentioned is the people who study translation not meaning that the people have already learn different types of foreign languages. Of course they can study any foreign language if they desire to learn it.
But, it is not an easy thing to learn a foreign language such as Japanese, Spanish, French and etc. It may takes several years to expert a foreign language.
Most of the freelance translator, I believed that they are very expert in two different languages. This is the minimum requirement... and the good news of Malaysian is we are able to do the translation more than two languages.
I'm not trying to make any criticisms on it...
I'm only sharing my opinion and experience at my blogger...
I hope my sharing points will bring you some benefit and guideline ...