PACTE, a research group from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, has been carrying out empirical and experimental research on translation competence (TC) for over a decade. In relation to the translation process, our research has both validated our TC model and yielded data on the specificity of the competence and on the differences between direct and inverse translation. We have now studied the translation product from the perspective of corpus linguistics. A corpus comprising direct and inverse translations performed by professional translators and foreign-language teachers as part of a PACTE experiment on TC forms the basis for the analysis presented here, which revolves around the use of certain features. Our findings show that there are no major differences between the two experimental groups and in terms of directionality where the use of many of the features in question (including calques, loanwords, translator’s notes, brackets, type/token ratio and sentence length) is concerned. In contrast, however, measuring the degree of similarity among translations has revealed clear differences.