The study sets out to develop a viable descriptive and target-oriented corpus-based methodology for the systematic study of the nature of translated text. The realization of this objective involves three main operations: (a) the elaboration of criteria for designing a monolingual, multi-source language English Comparable Corpus (ECC), (b) the application of these principles to the creation of two sub-sections of ECC, namely newspaper articles and narrative prose, and (c)the investigation of simplification as a universal of translation. The investigation of ECC focuses on global aspects of lexical and stylistic simplification and reveals four consistent patterns of lexical simplification in translated versus original texts, independently of text category. These patterns are: relatively lower proportion of lexical words versus grammatical words, relatively higher proportion of high frequency versus low frequency words, relatively greater repetition of the most frequent words and less variety in the words most frequently used.