The chief purpose of this article is to highlight the significant role which the pragmatic and semiotic dimensions of context play in tackling certain translation problems, spotting mistakes in different translations of a text and accounting for certain types of discrepancies between translations of a text into a given language. The author’s approach to these questions is based on Basil Hatim and Ian Mason's Discourse and the Translator (1990). To this end, the author analyses a number of real Spanish translations of various segments of text from Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime which he considers to be unsatisfactory. For this reason, he also puts forward several alternative translations of his own. The discussion centres on the pragmatic and semiotic dimensions of the texts, a perspective which traditionally has largely been disregarded, perhaps because pragmatic and semiotic aspects and features are more difficult to pin down and explain than others.