Abstract: This study aims to conduct a quantitative analysis of the relationship between the syntactic features of the source language and those of the target language. The dataset comprised 4,000 English-Chinese parallel sentences drawn from four genres: press, general prose, learned writing and fiction. Two indices, i.e., dependency distance and dependency direction, were employed to examine the correlation between source sentences (SSs) and their translated sentences (TSs), as well as to reveal the effect of the source language. Results were as follows: (i) Both the mean dependency distance (MDD) and the percentage of head-initial dependencies (PHID) between SSs and TSs were significantly correlated, with MDD exhibiting a stronger correlation than PHID, thereby indicating a more pronounced source language effect in MDD. (ii) The correlation for MDD between SSs and TSs was highest in learned writing, whereas that for PHID was highest in fiction. This pattern varied across sentence-length ranges, suggesting that both genre and sentence length shaped the manifestation of the source language effect. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of translational language, offer insight into the mechanisms of source language shining through, and have practical implications for improving translation quality assessment.