This paper combines procedures of Descriptive Translation Studies, Corpus Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics and has its roots in the author’s PhD thesis (Lawick 2001). Its aim is to analyze phrase-level units in a literary text and their translations, using aligned fragments of a parallel corpus (original text and translation), which permits the search for key words in different languages. The focus of this study is on somatisms, phrases with constituents referring to body-parts, which confer a special (metaphorical and literal) meaning to this kind of unit. It examines how these units are translated and if their figurative constituents are maintained.