Christopher Hampton, British playwright and translator of Ibsen as well as Les Liaisons Dangereux for the stage, has likened the process of translation to 'a gigantic crossword involving a huge number of tiny decisions'. The decisions Christopher Hampton is referring to are likely to range widely, from the choice of words to striking the right stylistic note, in other words making the right decision on a number of different linguistic levels. This paper is primarily concerned with the problems facing translators when trying to match lexical items between source language (SL) and target language (TL). In a next step, the reasons for making inappropriate choices and failing to 'find the right' word are related to methods of vocabulary learning and foreign language teaching, in particular the role of translation in modern language teaching.