This article deals with the translation of archaeological texts from Italian into German. To the author’s knowledge, there are no existing studies on either the German or the Italian language of archeology and no electronic databanks of archaeological texts This comparative study, the initial phase of such a project, is based on a small parallel corpus of Le Tombe dipinte di Paestum and the German translation Die Gräber mit Wandmalereien in Paestum, 2004. The goal is to isolate and compare the lexical and syntactic aspects of the two texts. In the author’s view, the technical terms are not particularly difficult to translate; the translator draws on a variety of compounds, internationalisms, borrowings and derivations of classical origin. The German syntax is characterized by normalization (the use of syntactic patterns typical of the target language), thus confirming Baker’s (1999) assertion that the lexical and syntactic features of translations from a prestigious source language (here Italian) are target-language oriented to a greater degree than translations from lesser used languages.