Undergraduate translation courses offered by English departments across Taiwan have long focused predominantly on language training. They have had too much in common, whether in nature or in function, with English reading and writing classes, and have fallen short to train students for potential translation tasks in the job market. Such courses are basically designed to enhance students’ comprehension and production skills of English, and the materials used mostly lack real translation contexts. The author of the present study believes that these problematic course objectives and designs can be properly remedied by functionalism proposed by German translation scholars including Reiss, Vermeer and Nord. The essence of functionalism lies in the fact that translation is a purposeful activity and is guided by its end or function, and the functionalist concepts have been advocated worldwide in the past two decades but there has been a lack of empirical studies on the effects of functionalism on translation teaching. Under the above rationale, the author had offered an undergraduate translation course to a group of 30 senior-year English majors in a private university in Taiwan based on concepts of functionalism and authentic materials from real or simulated translation tasks, while reporting the results and findings of this course through qualitative research methods. Conclusions of the present study show that the quality of students’ translations has generally improved, especially in their output of translation into Chinese. The students’ interest in translation has greatly increased, and they have come to think and act more like professional translators when facing translation tasks. The concepts of functionalism have also largely been well acquired by the students. In addition, most of the students agree that the use of authentic materials has encouraged them to take translation more seriously and see it as a real mission rather than just a course assignment, while the concepts of functionalism have helped them figure out or decide the purpose, function, target audience and text type of each translation task and compare the differences in time and place of text reception, etc. between the source text and target text. The author also suggested modifications on some functionalist concepts, including text typology, factors of translation brief, as well as the classification of translation problems, for more adequate application of functionalism in undergraduate translation courses in Taiwan.