The article deals with the issue of lexical gaps in the target language in connection with Norwegian technical terms which have either no English dictionary equivalent or multiple possibilities without adequate contextualisation. Using the choice network analysis which regards the target text to be 'tangible source of evidence of mental processing in translation' (Campbell 2000: 32), the article addresses three research questions: 1) Can the number of variant translations of the same translation item be an indication of how difficult it is to translate? 2) What strategies have been used by candidates when bilingual dictionaries do not have an equivalent term? 3) What criteria are relevant when comparing the quality of the different variants?