Medical brochures are used as a pedagogical tool in the training of medical translators. However, researchers have paid little attention to this genre from a contrastive point of view, despite its crucial importance as a didactic tool for teaching translation. Drawing on a corpus of 60 brochures covering medical subjects (30 in English, 30 in Spanish), the author has prepared this article with two aims in mind: (1) to study a set of text-external factors (the predominantly communicative role of the text, verbal acts, partners in communication, and textual reception and production) and text-internal features (macrostructure and metacommunicative strategies), and (2) to show how the results obtained contribute to planning and defining learning objectives for the training of medical translators according to didactic criteria.