Research shows that translation teachers with insufficient translation experience will become the bottleneck hindering the development of translation education. However, few studies have examined teachers' translation experience or factors motivating or demotivating them to practice translation. This study attempts to fill the gap by interviewing 11 experienced teachers in 9 Master of Translation and Interpreting (MTI) programmes in China following a semi-structured outline informed by a Systems Theory Framework (STF). It is found that despite the subjects' positive perceptions on the role of translation practice in translation teaching, their translation practice is passive, random, and somewhat utilitarian. Shaped by the combined influences of the individual, social, and environmental-societal systems, they take on translation tasks at the request of personal connections or to meet their research quota. They make hardly any formal contact with the translation market; neither are they familiar with modern technologies used in translation and language service companies. The study concludes by drawing implications for training, recruiting, and appraising translation teachers in China and beyond.