Within a broadly text-linguistic perspective, this paper complements some of the work of Raymond van den Broeck in relation to translation shifts (in the sense of systematic changes to the stylistic, rhetorical or structural features of the source text in translation). The key variables governing such shifts are genre, discourse and text – three important sets of intertextual constraints on translators’ freedom of action. The notions of literality and non-literality in translating are best viewed as options which are constrained by these higher-order, text-level variables, which themselves are subject to cross-cultural variation. Following a review of generic and discoursal shifts, the paper examines a case of shift in text structure from description to narration and seeks to show that such shifts occur in response to translators’ perceptions of source-text producers’ intentions and target-text receivers’ expectations, as expressed within the generic, discoursal and textual convention of different cultural and linguist communities.