This paper investigates the way in which the rhetoric function of user guides is dealt with in French-Swedish translation. Four translation students and six professional translators were asked to translate a user guide form French into Swedish, while thinking aloud. The results show that the students tend to tone down the rhetoric of the source text, whereas the translators tend to maintain it. In other words, the students resort more often to the strategy of omission than the translators. The students also follow older genre conventions, whereas most translators subscribe to more recent ones. The results have implications for translation pedagogy. The reveal the potential benefit of combining translation exercises with corpus analyses, and of presenting the diachrony of genre conventions. This type of knowledge will help student sin their translational decision-making.