This paper has a twofold objective. First, the author aims to stress that Translation Studies still forms an important subdiscipline of Translation Studies. Although the new ‘claims, changes and challenges’ of the discipline seem to be so fascinating that the linguistic problems of translation are sometimes overlooked, these problems continue to be omnipresent in the practice of translation and interpreting. Next, the author aims to show that linguistic Translation Studies is only useful for translation practice when it goes beyond the comparison of languages (as is done in contrastive analysis). While the object of contrastive analysis is the comparison of linguistic systems and norms, linguistic Translation Studies is always oriented towards the solution of translation problems. The arguments of the paper are illustrated by examples from three domains: information structure (topic-comment); word order (with regard to simultaneous interpreting); modalisation. The following languages are considered: German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English.