The purpose of the study was to determine, what differences arise between a German and a Swedish text regarding syntax and information structure when these are translated into the other language. The main focus has been to define the possible changes in the use of different clause elements in the initial position of the sentence and the structuring of main and sub clauses. A combination of a qualitative and a quantitative method was used for this purpose. Four literary texts were analyzed; an original text in German, the Swedish translation of this text, an original text in Swedish and its German translation. The results of the analyses were very different for the four texts. While the German translation of the Swedish original showed many examples of the kind of changes I was expecting to find, the Swedish translation of the German original did not show quite as many changes from the original and was in fact translated in a rather unidiomatic way. These results show that the amount of changes made in a text during translation depends a great deal on the translator and the style and genre of the original text.