This article's aim is to show how contrastive models of genres can inform research on translation products. The authors do so by deploying contrastive descriptions to analyze text production in different languages. Product-oriented Translation Studies are often grounded on language theory and description – in particular contrastive and typological descriptions, as translation involves more than one language. However, translation as phenomenon happens between texts, thus contrastive descriptions of particular text types could arguably serve translation more efficiently than generalized descriptions for whole languages. The authors provide a contrastive model along with a methodology for further exploration in translation. Based on the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework they provide a contrastive model of academic article introduction texts. Results show how contrastive modeling explains typological differences in choice of resources and the variation in text behavior when languages are compared.