The paper focuses on the problems of understanding a source text during the process of translating from a foreign language. The study reported compares a Spanish newspaper text and a Spanish legal text to be translated into Danish. The hypothesis is that, although legal terminology is a very important aspect of legal translation, for the Danish translator it does not constitute the most important difference between understanding a legal text and understanding a newspaper text. The most salient features are assumed to be the degree of cohesion and the level of explicitness found in the global structure of the text. The two genres are hypothesized to differ on these points, mainly because the formulation of a Spanish legal text is thought not to be motivated by an intention to communicate information in a broad sense.