The aim of my research is to bridge the gap between research into so-called translation universals (explicitation, implicitation, interference and shining-through) in the domain of corpus translation studies and, on the other hand, research of foreign language learning based on learner corpora. Besides the corpus-linguistic method, the connecting element between the two research traditions is the bilingual aspect. In particular, I examine whether and to what extent the translation universals could be the result of this bilingualism rather than being related to the specificity of translation. The focus of my research is on the language pair Dutch-German.