Starting from the perspective of translation, the author examines the influence of English on Italian scientific writing. This corpus-based investigation is carried out in two stages. In the first stage, features of information structure and focus attributing positions are studied in a corpus of English-Italian translations of popular physics articles to identify examples where wording does not appear to reflect the natural Italian word order. In the second stage these features are compared with those of a 32 corpus of original Italian articles on the same topic to see if the Italian information structure is used in translation or whether target texts reproduce the original English information structure. The author concludes that in her sample the translators do to some extent reproduce the information structure of the original English texts, resulting in a degree of 'unnaturalness'.