The purpose of the present study is (a) to investigate one of the consequences of the process of simplification, i.e. reduction in lexical density, in a number of texts and their translations from English into Chinese. It will also be hypothesized that (b) translated texts into English and (c) translated texts into Chinese, in comparison with similar monolingual texts in the two languages, will be less lexically dense. A Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) model will be used for defining and calculating lexical density. Some implications of the findings for teaching translation will also be discussed.