The purpose of this paper is first to review a body of think-aloud protocols (TAP) research which illuminates the way in which professionality shows in translators’ decision-making processes and second, to point out the implications of this research to translator training and translation industry. Professionality is defined as success of performance in relation to the translation brief. The discussion focuses on those dimensions of translators’ decision-making processes which have been observed to be sensitive to degrees of professionality. Thus the main points to be discussed are the knowledge base, the scope, the mutual compatibility, the timing and the accumulation of translational decisions.