Typologically similar languages, in particular those belonging to the same language family, such as the Indo-European languages, often have striking structural similarities, and many of them share a large number of cognates. In some cases, as can be seen between closely related Indo-European languages such as Spanish and Portuguese or between Danish and Norwegian, translation may not even be necessary, since the two languages are mutually comprehensible to a degree. In the present article it is argued that the difficulties in translation between these closely related languages are of an entirely different order, i.e. they stem from typological differences. The remarks presented here refer only to languages belonging to different typological classifications, and particularly to Japanese and English.