Not to discount the original question, which has merit, but I'd like to add a couple of thoughts/questions of my own.

Since the goal is ideally to internalize Chinese without mentally going through English in the first place, isn't it (theoretically) counter-productive to put any kind of emphasis on English-to-Chinese translation with such goals in mind?

Actually, I think English-to-Chinese translation is an important skill to develop, too. It just seems to me that this skill is rather unique compared with actually learning to think IN Chinese.

Additionally, my experience with language-learning is that starting with the thought in English in my mind and then trying to convert that thought into another language on the fly introduces a lot of unnecessary thought processes at best and certain sentence structure errors at worst. Additionally, it also seems to me that such a process also encourages bad language habits.

Considering the value of learning to think in Chinese, an interesting question arises as well. Aside from tutoring, how can the internalization of Chinese be developed online, from a practicality standpoint? The only way I know of to develop this ability is to use Chinese actively, by engaging in some type of dialogue.

I suspect that all this may be a major topic of linguistics, especially when it comes to teaching the language...

Just my 2 分。 :-)