Anyone who has travelled comes across tourist information that is badly translated, and anyone who buys electronic equipment has a chance of receiving some amusing translated documentation with their purchases. Some of the mistakes are easy to isolate – the ones that make it into the cartoon books – and it is easy to trace the source of the problems to fundamental language and translation incompetence. However, in procedural writing, meaning the broad category of text types exemplified by tourist guides and user documentation, some of the problematic renderings in translation come from more global mismatches. The goal of this paper is to look at some of the textual and metatextual constraints that result in these mismatches across languages and cultures.