This paper addresses the importance of social awareness in translation teaching. On the basis of the authors’ experiences as translators and as translation teachers in a global city such as Toronto, they discuss some of the challenges encountered in these daily practices. The first part of the paper is based on the experience of teaching Spanish-English translation. It focuses on the construction of the translator’s image and identity by means of including questions of social and cultural agency as part of the translator’s role and self-definition. The second part of the paper focuses on the French-English teaching experience. It discusses translation pedagogy from an ecological perspective centred on boundary-crossing and the observation of inter-language and inter-cultural relationships and proposes a non-authoritarian approach to the construction of meaning. The teaching of social awareness in translation programmes has become a humanitarian necessity in the globalized world. The principal goal of this paper is to call for a pedagogy of translation that focuses on the translator as a subject whose work has social and ethical implications.