The paper analyses translations of Polish labour law provisions into English and translations of a label for the national stereotype of Poles in the USA into Polish. The analysis is conducted from the perspective of sign-/form- and sense-oriented approaches to translation. The thesis of the paper is that translation errors in the texts of law acts may stem from adopting either of the approaches. With respect to labels for national stereotypes, the sense-oriented translation must change the form of the rendered lexeme in spite of the fact that a borrowing is translated.