This study is situated within the broader field of phraseology and concerns repetitive, echoic binomials such as day by day (NPN) and on and on (‘ADV and ADV’). While the bulk of previous research has focused on their use in individual languages (Jackendoff 2008; Ziem 2008), this study takes a comparative approach, using data from two parallel corpora: the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The results indicate that binomials, in particular of the NPN type, are most frequent in Swedish originals. In English originals, they are rare and not very productive. In translations, frequencies closely mirror those in their originals, but other recurrent patterns (e.g., one X at a time) are also commonly used as correspondences.