AbstractThe aim of this paper is to show the importance of awareness in translation, particularly in the area of translator competence. The word and the concept of awareness can be seen more and more frequently in the specialised literature. This paper includes an account of many of the areas of translation where awareness is a relevant concept and how it has been incorporated into my own ‘P‐R model’ of translation. The P‐R model is an attempt to explain all of the translator's decisions and performances in terms of a dependency relationship between two variable sets of Priorities and Restrictions.