The author examines and analyses the phenomenon of culture-bound words, terms, and phrases in translation comparing the latter in French, Italian and Spanish with English. The lexical field the author explores is institutional texts. he intends to explain and specify the difficulty in achieving comprehensible transfer due to cultural boundaries and both connotative and denotative forces. He deals with semantic divergence and convergence of term equivalence, mentioning etymological similarities and where synchrony has caused semantic differences to intervene with cultural factors which can lead to confusion and may give rise to incorrect transfer of concepts or ambiguity. The main linguistic and cultural groupings in the above languages relate to a common cultural and linguistic heritage of a catholic and greco-latin base in the case of French, Italian and Spanish, and a protestant anglo-saxon one in the case of English. The author finally offers some solutions to the issues raised.