Targeting at adequate translation while teaching translation to engineers any teacher should remember about social and cultural discrepancies between languages. The difference in mentality should not be reflected in the special target text. Engineering students are supposed not only to be able to find proper equivalents and render the terms appropriately but also to analyse the communicative situation and cultural peculiarities of the source text. Teaching professionally oriented translation depends on many factors including ontological and specialised cultural levels, technological progress and its incorporation into the national, international and global culture, linguistic diachrony and its role in terminological corpus formation as well as science and technology institutional role. Teaching translation at engineering academy has a long and fruitful history, which shows the efficiency of training intercultural and sociocultural competence in teaching translation. It allows to avoid serious drawbacks in translation when a translator confronts the other language culture images and concepts.