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‪The history of the vernacular translations of the scientific or technical literature of the Middle Ages, the so-called ‪ ‪Fachliteratur‪‪ in German, presents many terminological and philological problems: these texts sometimes contain copy errors carried over into subsequent editions, and misreading is often the primary reason why specific objects are incorrectly identified. This article aims to provide a sample of the difficulties encountered in the translation of scientific or technical writing. It considers the translation of names of different species, in particular botanical ones, which are often very locally specific and sometimes even extinct. It also looks at the issue of accurately transmitting the names of colors from one linguistic area to another, and, lastly, the adoption of new terms introduced from the twelfth century onward into the medieval Western world by the Latin translations from Arabic about the science of the stars. This brief overview of various different fields of medieval science reveals that there was some resistance when it came to identifying and transposing the peculiar to the universal, or integrating new words into a target language. It also briefly touches upon the significance of medieval glossaries, lists of synonyms, and lexicons, which were very useful for medieval readers and can still be of great help for modern readers or translators.‪