Assessing translation quality is generally seen as a difficult task because of the inadequacy of the tools available. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of a corpus-based contrastive methodology (ACTRES Project) developed at the University of León (Spain) for identifying instances of low-quality rendering of grammatical features when translating from English into Spanish using translation universals. The analysis provides information about: i) the resources available (or absence thereof) in each of the languages to express a given meaning and their relative centrality; ii) the solutions favored by translators to bridge the cross-linguistic disparities and/or gaps; iii) the erroneous or non-existent uses and structures transferred from the source language into the target language. These results can be systematized in terms of simplification, interference, or unique grammatical features.