This article is situated at the intersection of two subfields in translation studies: corpus-based translation studies and news translation research. It draws on both of these fields to develop an approach that allows us to identify the presence of translation in an historical French newspaper, the Gazette de France (1632-1792). Through a series of case studies inspired by so-called translation “universals,” it tests the widespread assumption that the section of the newspaper called Nouvelles ordinaires is made up of dispatches translated from gazettes published in Germanic languages. By confirming this hypothesis, the results support research carried out on the history of the press and underscore the hermeneutical value of the universal of interference.