The global market forces have had a strong influence on Higher Education. Universities worldwide have been largely commercialised. Despite a number of work that has been published on the relationship between universities and the market, limited research has been done in examining and comparing the impact of market forces on the degree courses in different countries, especially in the case of Translation Studies. The broad aim of this comparative research is to study the differences in curricula and translating programme design between China and the UK within different national traditions in teaching and learning, as well as different global, social and economic contexts. More specifically, it seeks to investigate the impact of the neo-liberal economic globalisation on the HE sectors in both countries, and how their degree courses (including translation programmes) have responded to these market forces driven by the neoliberalism. This study also investigates the design and delivery of translation courses in these two countries from the perspective of course aims and module content, placing a clear focus on the tensions between education (academia) and training (profession), and intends to establish how the educational content and professional needs are balanced in the curricula of translation programmes. A major contribution of this thesis is that it is the first study in English to analyse the impact of neoliberalism on the degree courses in Translation Studies, and to employ the tension between educational content and professional needs in the analysis of the current curricula in two different national contexts. It also contributes to the quality assurance of translation programmes, in particular with the integration of standards and benchmarks in the translation profession. The author's analysis shows that the market forces have placed pressures on the translation programmes in both countries that they need to develop courses to address the needs of employers and students. This finding is further tested by comparing the three selected case programmes in each country and the two collective case studies (the UK and China), and shows that translation programmes in the UK are generally struggling with the balance between theoretical units and professional issues. In China, the MTI programmes have adopted different strategies to design professionally-oriented translation courses due to economic, geographical, and personnel factors. But in both countries, it is common for translation programmes with more resources to have a higher degree of professional issues, whereas other under-funded universities do the opposite.