During the apartheid era, the nine African languages spoken by the majority of the population did not enjoy official status and were to all intents and purposes nothing but “symbolic totems”. They were largely without developed terminologies, adequate dictionaries or extensive literatures. Translation in these languages did, however, occur in limited areas. One of the major problems faced with is the fact that African languages do not yet have developed terminologies and that translation into these languages is therefore not practically possible. In this paper, the authors attempt to test this hypothesis by examining how translation students in the postgraduate diploma in translation were able to circumvent the lack of appropriate terminology when translating a text given in exam conditions.