The generally accepted view is that translation should be taught to people with a good command of a foreign language. But research findings on bilingualism defy that notion. The first stage of bilingualism is the translation stage of foreign language learning, which means that a person has to do translation in order to understand or say something in a foreign language. The aim of this article is to analyze different nouns used in German for denoting profession, their origin and meaning. Some other lexical items that belong to the semantic field economics / economy are discussed as well. Identifies synonymous pairs, formed by derivational tracing, with their preferable usage.