Babel 60 : 1 (2014), 70–90. © Fédération des Traducteurs (f it) Revue Babel doi 10.1075/babel.60.1.05vil issn 0521–9744 e-issn 1569–9668 Micro-function combination patterns and linguistic adequacy in specialised texts Karin Vilar Sánchez University of Granada (Spain) 1. Introduction Research in the ield of specialised translation has generally been characterized by a particular interest in terminology. At the same time, the description of the con- ventions of textualisation have been neglected to some extent; even though they appear to constitute a major problem for researchers and also for translators; pos- sibly because they operate on a deeper level of consciousness and therefore repre- sent a special challenge. But as House (2001: 251) puts it, the linguistic choices at the text level should not be let to individual intuition but be based on linguistic- textual analysis, description, explanation, and comparison, all founded on empir- ical research and on professional knowledge of linguistic structures and norms of language use. In an international research project carried out in the University of Granada these requirements were met by applying a functional approach to the analysis of the text speciic style of Spanish and German working contracts (Vilar Sánchez 2007). he results obtained constitute a useful database for translators since on the one hand it ofers contextualised information about the diferent linguistic means used for a series of text constituent functions, and on the other hand, text type speciic as well as interlinguistic functional combination patterns came to light. In this paper, irstly the micro-functional text analysis approach is briely explained and following this, some of the text speciic combination patterns and their lan- guage speciic diferences will be discussed. 2. Micro-functions and the description of text speciic surface shape 2.1. he methodology of micro-functional analysis Although in recent years there has been a modest increase in the concern for styl- istic aspects in the area of specialised translation (House 1981; 1996; 1997; 1998;