Nord presents a model of the translation process for didactic purposes that illustrates the many and very different spheres of skills and knowlege involved in translating. In this paper it is argued that both translation students and even experienced translators could benefit from using Nord's model of the translation process. By referring to the model and thereby using it as a decision-aiding tool, they could optimize the translation quality. The author concludes by introducing genre knowledge as an additional decision-aiding tool and discusses where genre knowlegde is to be placed in the model and to what extent genre knowledge may influence the target text production.