Following previous work on linking constructions in English and German discourse, this study takes a closer look at the functions, the distributions, the collocational potential, and the translation equivalents of two linking constructions: for example and for instance in English original texts, their German translations and German comparable texts. Apart from its corpus-based inquiry into the behaviour of the two linking constructions, the study also aims to show how useful comparative analyses of translated and original texts can be for making us better understand complex linguistic phenomena in context and use.