This paper compares the use of the colon in English, German, and Swedish originals and translations. The material stems from the Linnaeus University English-German-Swedish corpus (LEGS), which contains original and translated non-fiction books. Both in originals and translations, colons are the most common in German and the least common in English. Colons tend to be translated into colons, but when they are not, commas or no punctuation are the preferred alternatives. English prefers using full sentences before quoted material (One sentence recurs throughout the book:), while Swedish and German often rely on elliptic clauses (Ein Politiker sagt:). A noteworthy finding is the German preference for using fragments before colons (Das Resultat:). This phenomenon is an effect of German writers and translators wanting to avoid verb-final subordinate clauses. This tendency is so strong that German translators sometimes reduce full source-text clauses to utterances consisting of fragments + colons preceding main clauses. In general, such reduced and implicit structures are rare in translations.The occurrence of such translations in our material indicates that target-language norms may sometimes be stronger than translation universals, i. e. explicitation, which refers to the tendency for translation to be more overt than their originals.