The purpose of the research is to describe and analyze the methodology of teaching the translation of phrases, the most important component of which is a preliminary discussion in the native language of both the topic and the situation reflected in the text, in order to avoid literalism. The types of activities in French for specific purposes have been considered in the framework of the organization of mental activity of students occurring within translation. Training in the effective translation of set expressions with numerals includes the selection of fragments of French texts on the subject of the future profession (agriculture; medicine), as well as a preliminary search for additional meanings and connotations of French expressions. The pragmatics of the whole text as well as the gap between the dictionary meaning in French and in Russian together with the nuance of the actualized sense of the forms and components of the source text and the situation of a given communicative act often lead to rejection of the literal transmission by the Russian expression with the same numeral. We propose the term "top - down procedure for building a system of exercises" for teaching translation (from the text to its components), which is understood as a sequence of steps opposite to the traditional one, namely: training begins with an understanding of the content of the text and a preliminary presentation and analysis of it in the native language, followed by the translation of its smaller components. Serious difficulties arise for students when they deal with translation of a dead metaphor expressed by phraseological units with numerals having a fairly well-defined vocabulary value.