Over the past 7 years, our laboratory has dissected malaria parasite proteins that are involved in protein translation. Our work has highlighted the importance of parasitic tRNA synthetases as new druggable targets. We will discuss how the malaria parasite is able to utilise its resources to achieve protein translation in three separate cellular compartments. We will also discuss complex structures of two tRNA synthetases with natural product compounds, and analyse bases for development of drug resistance.