This article deals with some issues encountered in the various stages of a translation project conducted by a team of translators and the project leader when translating a specialized text. The source language text under study is an institutional text by nature (the official issue of Standard Marine Communication Phrases) and its translation into Croatian as the target language. The problems range from purely organizational issues (e.g. guidelines for the team of translators, allocating relevant parts of the texts to the translators) to decisions on whether the translation equivalents offered should be considered as candidates for establishing a new maritime terminological norm in the target language. In this article three major aspects and problems involved in the process of translating such texts are discussed: the nature of the translation project, textual features of the Standard Marine Communication Phrases, and, predominantly, lexical/terminological issues.