The study aims at demonstrating the benefits of contextual analysis for translation practice in the life sciences, in particular, in the quality of life studies. The ongoing globalization of the life sciences is a source of persistent challenges for translators. Life science researchers are incessantly coming up with new uses of language in their linguistic tools for data collection such as scripts for structured interviews, disease-specific and quality of life questionnaires. Since the majority of linguistic tools for cross-cultural life science research are developed in English, the most common, everyday English words denoting emotional and bodily experiences are acquiring the status of terms in this academic field. Translators cannot rely on the conventional practice, whereby such words as “happy”, “content”, “enjoy”, “satisfied” are translated based on the context by means of translation transformations. In life science linguistic tools, these words are supposed to be translated in isolation from the context, like terms. This new terminological status of everyday English words makes high demands on translators' understanding of these words as integrated units of the lexical system of the source language (English). Due to fragmented presentation of lexical meanings, dictionaries do not provide adequate information for the needs of translation of linguistic tools. In contrast, our contextual analysis makes an attempt to treat each word as a semantic whole, which unveils the semantic aspects crucial for the purposes and values of the life sciences. To illustrate the potential of contextual analysis as an important stage of translation process in the life sciences, we consider the functioning of the word “to enjoy” in quality of life questionnaires, review the existing translations of this word, and show how a contextual analysis of this word helps to establish a semantic base for new, more adequate translation solutions, which ultimately helps to enhance intercultural academic communication. The findings presented in this paper are the result of our analysis of 350 samples of use of the word “enjoy” from the British National Corpus, and some results of the previous studies in the field conducted by one of the authors.