This study examines Swedish NN compounds and their French translations in a bidirectional parallel corpus. A total of 1,741 Swedish NN compounds were attested and 81% corresponded to N or to N A or N de (Det) N constructions in French. The frequency of Swedish NN compounds differs depending on whether the text is source text or target text as well as on text genre (fiction vs. non-fiction) and the style of the author or translator. This work has also classified 1,027 French translations of Swedish NN compounds based on their translation technique. Established equivalent was by far the most frequent technique followed by Generalization. The remaining techniques, such as Modulation, Transposition,and Explicitation, were rarely used. A conclusion drawn from this work is that it is difficult to maintain a strict division between translation studies and contrastive linguistics in an analysis of word formation and translation techniques.