This paper starts by discussing the reasons why linguists should be interested in parallel corpora. I outline the questions that parallel corpora enable us to ask, and relate them to traditional questions in linguistics and translation theory. The paper then suggests a method for arriving at answers to some of these questions. The proposed method builds on the notion of “ modulation” from Vinay and Darbelnet (1958) and attempts to put this notion on a sounder theoretical and empirical basis. It also includes a method of sharing data from different language pairs in a “ Contrastive Linguistic Database”.