Within the industrial context of the information society, technical translation represents a considerable commercial stake. In the light of this, machine translation is considered as being an application of paramount importance. It is for this reason that the activitiesof B'VITAL have always centered around the processing of technical texts. The following article gives an account of the various tasks carried oat over the last few years on corpus analysis. We have drawn conclusions as to the validity of the notion of text typologies, applied in particular to technical matter, with a view to developing a machine translation system. The study was conducted using a fair amount of French documents and has led us to observe in particular, that a same typology may be identified in texts originatingfrom varying fields.