This article is based on the study of a small corpus of Italian translations and original Italian texts in the fields of economics and physics, also deals with translation quality. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data suggest that the shift from an ideational to an interpersonal function – a phenomenon previously reported by House (2002) – is also found in specialized translations from English into Italian. Moreover, all processes mentioned by Baker (1995) – normalization, explicitation, simplification and leveling-out – are at work in the translations included in the corpus. The author concludes that quantitative corpus analysis in itself is not sufficient to assess the quality of a translation but must be supplemented by qualitative corpus analysis.