In his book Handbook of Translation Peter Newmark argued that a translator works on four levels: translation is a science, a skill, an art and a matter of taste. In this article the author concentrates on the first two levels, science and skill. Because students of translation often appear to have difficulties in establishing the meaning of a particular SLT item and with finding an appropriate TLT equivalent, the author attempts to outline a general translation strategy in order to help them in their continuous struggle with words and their meaning. The author argues that the process of analyzing a word's meaning in context is in principle similar to that of analyzing its meaning in isolation, i.e. the analysis of a word's meaning at sentence level resembles its analysis at below-word level. The author attempts to bring both types of analysis together in a practical linguistic model.