The present article aims at elucidating the difficulties encountered by the first-year university students with regard to the understanding of the source text to be translated into their mother tongue. We will start from the premises that the translation exercises from French into Romanian involve mainly the correct and accurate understanding of the basic vocabulary words in the specific contexts triggered by the text to be translated. Also, translation exercises focus precisely on understanding and consolidating the multiple meanings that common words can develop in various contexts. We highlight the fact that the first-year students that are required to translate a text from French into Romanian may distinguish, on the one hand, French common words and on other hand, words that sound familiar to the Romanian speakers. These are precisely those “familiar” terms that often pose translation difficulties due to their particular contexts of use. They can also develop meanings whose understanding and clarification require a good monolingual French dictionary in order to provide an adequate translation of a specific text.