This article is an investigation into the use of the present participle in Swedish and French, carried out within the theoretical framework of contrastive linguistics and based on a corpus consisting of texts of fictional prose in the original Swedish and in French translation. In two introductory sections preceding the analytic part of the article the development of contrastive linguistics in the 20th century is outlined and the relation in which this discipline stands to translation studies is briefly accounted for. This section also discusses at some length the methodological aspects of "translational contrastive analysis" as applied in the present study. The analysis shows that the French present participle, while being more frequent than the Swedish one in absolute terms, is functionally more restricted since it occurs almost exclusively as a predicate. The Swedish present participle, on the other hand, although rare in the predicative function, is characterized by its wide range of uses other than the "verbal" one: nominal, adnomi-nal, adverbal, adjectival, adverbial. The chief difference between the Swedish and the French present participle is thus fundamentally one of syntactic distribution.