The aim of the article is to complement a quantitative study on existential constructions in French and English, both in translated and original texts and based on the exploitation of comparable corpora (Cappelle & Loock 2013). What this article shows is that such an overall quantitative approach should be complemented with a more qualitative approach, for two main reasons: (i) overall quantitative results provide only a general view on the differences between translated texts and original texts, hiding subtle but crucial variations; (ii) the use of comparable corpora does not provide any information on the strategies used by translators and on the translation process itself. The article also provides suggestions for implications in translator training and translation quality assessment.