This study explores translation patterns of EU legislative discourse from a probabilistic point of view. The main focus is on prescriptive sentences, i.e. deontic norms and performatives and their linguistic representation in a multilingual parallel corpus of EU Secondary Legislation. Although the intended message is expected to be the same for all four languages, linguistic patterns vary consistently according to the type of legislative statement and to the EU legal instrument. Information theory is applied to measure the degree of randomness occurring in the translation of particular legislative sentences and to draw possible conclusions on the standardization of EU instruments.