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.
