This paper presents the preliminary results of a case study framed in the actual practice of translation for the publishing industry. Taking as a starting point the contrastive analysis of a corpus comprising a French original text, the draft of its translation submitted to a Spanish publishing house and the book which was finally published, the study shows how some shifts considered to be translation universals, such as explicitation or avoidance of repetitions, cannot always be directly attributed to translators but they are the result of an editing strategy aimed at normalizing the final text and improving its readability. The study puts forward a general reflection on why is important to take into account the role of correctors and editors in contrastive analyses of texts and their translations in order to better understand the specificity of the different agents involved in the many stages of publishing a book.