The present study is based on a translation into Swedish of three French journalistic articles on energy sobriety. The study aims at comparing the source and the target texts, with regard to clause frequency and the use of various clause and phrase categories. This analysis is linked to the structural differences between the two languages, that have been stated by researchers in contrastive linguistics. The clause and phrase categories in focus have been defined by Olof Eriksson (1997), and used as translation units in his contrastive study on the French and Swedish languages. 

The results of the analysis prove that the Swedish translation is characterised by a considerably higher clause frequency than the French source texts. The reason is that the translation has led to more phrases being replaced by clauses, than the opposite. This divergency is conform to the stated differences between French and Swedish – a conclusion that also can be drawn regarding the most frequent shifts from phrase to clause categories, especially the ones including a participle phrase. However, not all observed shifts are obligatory, which means that the results could be somewhat different if the analysis was based on a translation conducted by someone else. In a future study, it would therefore be interesting to extend the analysis to include several versions of the same translated text.