The authors examine some of the problems that students encounter in reading texts to be translated. Translation students often tend to focus on individual words without looking at the text as a whole and taking into account the general context. They eventually have to learn to gain a certain distance from the original text and anticipate meaning so that they can rephrase it in the idiom of the other language. Philosophical hermeneutics can offer a useful theoretical framework and concepts in a pedagogical perspective to describe the act of reading and the process of understanding.