It isn’t the literal meanings of the words that make it difficult. It’s the connotations — all those associated ideas that hang around a word like shadows of other meanings. It’s connotation that makes house different from home and makes scheme into something shadier in American English than it is in British English. A good translator, accordingly, will try to convey the connotative as well as the literal meanings in the text; but sometimes that can be a whole bundle of meanings at once, and trying to fit all of them into the space available can be like trying to stuff a down sleeping bag back into its sack.
