In learning a foreign language, the phenomenon of lexical collocation is an important yet easily neglected area. Take the example of learning English as a foreign language (EFL). EFL teachers and students generally look upon grammar and vocabulary as the sole indication of one's proficiency in English. Yet the truth is, when the learner's knowledge in English grammar and vocabulary has expanded to reach a certain level, although his writing will be fluent and grammatically flawless, yet it will not be exactly like what native speakers of English would have written. One of the reasons will be the lack of habitual word combinations – that is, collocations – in the learner's writing. The same thing also happens to Chinese-to-English translation and causes considerable trouble for translation learners. For example, in translating the Chinese phrase ge chu e xi (‘to get rid of a bad habit’), the student is inclined to making a literal translation into English like remove a bad habit, not knowing that remove and habit is not a habitual combination in English at all, and that break and habit is, for example. This article first explores the types of collocation in English, and then goes on to investigate the problems encountered by students about collocation in translating. Two types of collocation are usually distinguished: grammatical collocation and lexical collocation. It is suggested that what causes the students the most trouble is lexical collocation. Also among the types of translation activities, it is Chinese-to-English translation where lexical collocation presents the most trouble. This article suggests a model to tackle this problem. Finally, the problem of how to find correct English collocations is also discussed, i.e. through the checking of collocation dictionaries and the search in a corpus of English.