In translating culturally marked terms, a frequent procedure is the loan, which leaves the apprehension of meaning to the co-text or other sources. At a first glance, the loan would seem to be the simplest procedure, standing as a sort of zero degree of interference of the translational operation. A detailed examination of a corpus of translations from Brazilian Portuguese into American English suggests, however, that the loan procedure may be indeed fairly complex, involving a spectrum of translation decisions far removed from any zero degree of the translational act.