This study focuses on the college English major translation courses, exploring feasible paths to consciously cultivate students’ critical thinking in translation practice. It also clarifies the intrinsic connection between critical thinking and translation practice, and points out that the text interpretation, strategy selection, and result revision in the translation process naturally include thinking stages such as questioning, analysis, argumentation, and reflection. The article highlights a series of teaching strategies based on translation practice, including setting questioning tasks around text interpretation, guiding strategy analysis through comparisons of multiple versions of translation, strengthening immediate judgment and information screening in oral translation training, and developing reflection ability through group mutual evaluation and self-revision. The implementation methods of the strategies are demonstrated through classroom scenarios. The study believes that as long as the task design and classroom organization in the existing translation courses are moderately adjusted, it is possible to continuously improve students’ critical thinking without adding excessive burden, thereby effectively improving translation quality and enhancing the effectiveness of English major talent cultivation.