This paper builds on the author's doctoral thesis and describes the different clefting structures in Portuguese as a means of conveying the focus-ground structure of texts. Clefting is used to mark the text with the sender perspective. The broad variety of cleft sentences in Portuguese is connected to a complex variety of functions, and thus confronts the translator with the challenge of translating them into other languages such as German, a language which does not have this structural variety owing to its relatively free word order. Some possible translation methods based on the functions of cleft sentences are presented and illustrated.