This paper provides a corpus-based contrastive analysis on the use of Cleft sentences in French and Italian, based on a corpus of translated newspaper articles. The analysis of data extracted from parallel or translation corpora and comparable corpora allows the highlighting of cases of interference due to translation. For example, the number of Implicit Clefts, which are the most frequent forms of Cleft sentences in Italian (Sono stati gli oligarchi a fare da mediatori) is much lower in translated texts because that construction does not exist in French. Therefore, it is necessary to make a combined analysis of translation corpora and comparable corpora to distinguish between the possibilities offered by each language's structural conventions and the stylistic options chosen by the translator.