The term ambiguity covers a multitude of virtues, ranging from the desired polysemy of poetic disclosure to unintended slips made by lawyers in drafting documents but which later may give rise to lucrative disputes among their construers, and from simple punning to highly complex semantic fuzziness. Figures of speech are sometimes the cause of such phenomena. While many authorities on ambiguity are interested in the question of how to resolve it by disambiguating (see for example Graeme Hirst, Semantic interpretation and the resolution of ambiguity, Cambridge: CUP 1987), translators presumably have to try to preserve in their target text whatever was said done and achieved in and by the source text including the transfer of any ambiguities. This objective can present enormous problems, some of which will be addressed in this paper.