This paper makes a plea for conducting systematic comparative studies of translated and original texts on the basic of contrastive discourse analysis, in which both macro-structures and the effect of micro-structural devices on the structure of the text as a whole are taken into account. The author further stresses the importance of paying attention to the relationship between translational shifts and the norm(s) governing the translated text-type in the target culture. His reflections are based on an analysis of a corpus of French and English cookery recipes translated into Dutch.