So far, legal texts translation research has applied mainly terminological, morphosyntactic or text-structure approaches. This article proposes a contrastive analysis of a legal text subtype, the divorce sentence in Germany and Spain, by using also a thematic perspective, comparing the respective legislations of the two countries. The article aims at showing that thematic differences have an impact at the textual level, thus making it necessary to carry out a detailed analysis of both the thematic and the textual fields if a deep knowledge of a text is to be achieved.