In 1982, Hönig and Kussmaul wrote that translation strategies are the main link between theory and practice, and stated that translation strategies justify translation theory and should be integrated in the teaching of translation. Ten years later, Gile seemed to think that the teaching of these strategies was already common in many courses. Translation strategies are also present in most of the published translation manuals, some of them even with exercises on this topic. The present article aims to propose another way to approach them, which can be applied to the teaching of translation. The author has designed a binary decision tree to help students focus on certain textual and contextual constraints and develop potentially optimal solutions.