Abstract The Dutch particle toch and modal adverb eigenlijk both belong to the broad domain of ‘contrast’: their prototypical functions have been described as ‘concession’ and ‘counterexpectation’, respectively, and both have been attributed emphatic discourse uses (e.g. toch as a common ground reminder and eigenlijk as a reinforcement marker). This study analyses the multifunctional scope of toch and eigenlijk in Dutch and maps their translation equivalents in English through an in-depth analysis of the Dutch-English component of the Europarl corpus. For eigenlijk the most common correspondents ( in fact, really, actually ) belong to the core of the semantic domain of (counter)expectation, whereas none of the English correspondents of toch is able to capture the marker’s duality as both a concessive and a common ground marker. The high degree of zero correspondences in English source texts suggests the translators’ strong awareness of the markers’ pragmalinguistic contribution.