Saussure’s Course has three Chinese versions, two of them translated from French and one from Wade Baskin’s English version. Previous critics on the Chinese versions mainly focus on terminology and stylistic. In this paper I propose to analyze the passage of p. 155-169 of the Course, a coherent part on the concept of value in which Saussure borrows a series of terms from mathematics, which the translators did not grasp. By this analysis I will show how the misunderstanding of one term can lead to a series of translation problems.