By looking beneath the level of text to sentences, and then in turn to clauses, phrases, words and even morphemes, this paper links the lower levels of linguistic analysis with the high-level concept of communicative purpose, thus providing an actual methodology for evaluating translations from a functional perspective. The text chosen for analysis through the application of Functional Sentence Perspective (FSP) is the opening paragraph of Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago translated into four languages. The treatment of this short literary extract leads to a comparison of translation alternatives in terms of the distribution of information in the ST and the TTs using a set of semantic functions (Dynamic Semantic Functions or DSFs) which are then linked to their status as thematic or non-thematic in the sentence perspective. The author’s theoretical framework provides a means of judging ‘faithfulness’ in translation in relation to the communicative purpose of the original.