Many words have more than one translation across languages. Such " translation -ambiguous" words are translated more slowly and less accurately than their unambiguous counterparts. We examine the extent to which word context and translation dominance influence the processing of translation -ambiguous words. We further examine how these factors influence translation ambiguity stemming from two sources, specifically translation ambiguity derived from semantic ambiguity and from near-synonymy. Bilingual participants were presented with English-German word pairs that were preceded by a related or unrelated prime and were asked to decide if the word pairs were translations . Translation -unambiguous pairs were recognized more quickly and accurately than translation -ambiguous pairs. Related pairs and dominant translations were responded to more quickly than unrelated pairs and subordinate translations , respectively. We discuss the results in relation to models of bilingual memory and propose a new model that makes specific predictions about translation ambiguity, the Revised Hierarchical Model of Translation Ambiguity.