Translation studies rely more and more on corpus data to examine specificities of translated texts, that can be translated from different original languages and compared to original texts. In parallel, more and more multilingual corpora are becoming available for various natural language processing tasks. This paper questions the use of these multilingual corpora in translation studies and shows the methodological steps needed in order to obtain more reliably comparable sub-corpora that consist of original and directly translated text only. Various experiments are presented that show the advantage of directional sub-corpora.