The author conceives of translation as a decision process: a series of a certain number of consecutive situations – moves, as in a game – situations imposing on the translator the necessity of choosing among a certain (and very often exactly definable) number of alternatives. He characterizes translation from a teleological point of view as a “process of communication”. The author describes the various components of the decision process: the situation, the paradigm (the class of possible solutions) and the choice the translator makes. Once the translator has decided in favour of one of the alternatives, he has created the context for a certain number of subsequent decisions. The suggestions presented in this article aim at constructing a generative model of translation by means of the methods used in defining decision problems.