My study mainly consists in analysing precise examples rather than developing long theories, as the readers of this journal are not translation experts, but would benefit from a translator's viewpoint for their own research. The study focuses on written articles and leaves oral communications aside because they entail different translation issues (e.g. ways to address an English-speaking audience, simpler syntax, or words easy to pronounce for a non-native English speaker). The corpus of the article is extracted from my own experience as a freelance translator and tackles different fields, i.e. management, law, psychology and even geography. All the examples are either translated from English to French or from French to English. My study aims to debunk misconceptions about translation, more specifically in academic environments. I chose to divide my presentation in six main stereotypes : 1) Translating is easier and quicker than writing. Wrong. Translating is a long-term process which involves, among other things, language skills, content-based knowledge, appropriating the rationale and ideas of the author, and rewriting the whole article, the translator becoming a co-author of the article. 2) Machine translation yields good results. Wrong. Even if machine translation is a useful, time-saving tool for translators and researchers, it cannot replace human translators who are still needed at least for post-editing. 3) Literal translation ensures the quality of the translation. Wrong. Being faithful to the words in the source language text would often sound awkward in the target language ; the translated article would sound like a translation, without intending to do so for stylistic reasons. A case in point is, when authors can translate their own articles, they rephrase their own work and usually choose a different perspective from their original article ; they do not convey exactly the same meaning in the translated article. 4) Everyone speaks the same English. Wrong. Each country-or even states for larger countries-use English differently and have developed their own English. Authors should therefore write their articles differently when they submit their paper to a British, American, Australian, Canadian or Indian journal. This factor also depends on the scientific community you belong to, as it will superimpose specific terminology, phraseology and standards to tackle the same subject.