The translation of specialist texts is a complex and incentive task, particularly in the case of professional translators with a language-literature focused training and education. More than other professionals in the fields of translating and interpreting, they are prone to both erroneous reading in the stage of intralingual translation and erroneous translations in the target language. This paper was inspired by the detection of such a misreading whose consequence was noted in an exercise of translation quality assessment. The source of the error was a case of paronymy spotted in the Romanian language (source) text. The existence of such couples of paronyms characterizes both English and Romanian vocabularies, irrespective of their belonging to the word stock or to terminologies. An exploration of diverse lexicographic works, such as glossaries, lexicons and dictionaries facilitated the determination of a few types of confusing words which complement the set of paronyms. That paronyms are seen from different perspectives in English and Romanian is obvious from the brief references to specialist literature, and that they nevertheless share a few features in both languages is demonstrated in a comparative segment of this approach. What this article emphasizes in particular is the lexical and terminological facets whose complexities and intricacies may be the source of difficulty and error in the translation of specialized texts.