This paper presents work in progress on one aspect of the project “Covert Translation” that was carried out inside the Research Center of Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg. The paper starts with a brief description of the project’s underlying research question and the kinds of texts it investigates. After introducing the corpus and the method of analysis, the author presents some results that can be interpreted as constructions of closeness and distance in texts. Closeness and distance are multidimensional phenomena, and they are closely bound up with notions of consistency and coherence.