In this paper, the author is on the lookout for the linguistic and textlinguistic factors which will account for the choice of a particular Finnish word order as a translation equivalent for an English construction, the agent passive, which has no linguistic equivalent in Finnish. The explanations offered by previous research turned out inadequate, when they were tested against data collected from authentic corpora representing different genres. Hiirikoski argues that a tenable account of word order must draw on observations from genre-specific corpora as well as a scrupulous linguistic analysis.