This paper aims to shed some light on the way both translators and foreign language speakers make vocabulary choices. Another more specific objective is to suggest a means to deal with problems raised by the need for accuracy in the source-language text and for adequacy in target-language use. A kind of dialogue is established between multiple research fields by presenting, on the one hand, two works that consider the problem of lexical acquisition and human lexicon differently (Bybee 1985; DiSciullo & Williams 1987) and, on the other, theoretical discussions (Basílio 1980; 1993; 1997 and 1998; Nattinger, J. R. and J. S. Decarrico 1992; Gross, M.1982) and findings in different research fields like translation (Correia, M. 2002), computational linguistics (Carvalho, P. 2001; Baptista, J. 1994) and Portuguese as a Foreign Language teaching (Scherer, M. 2002). [Source: abstract in journal] Keywords: Lexicon; Lexical choice; Productivity.