The present study investigates the lexical features of three of the so-called translation universals, namely, simplification, explicitation and levelling out, for the Brazilian Portuguese language. The aim was to test their validity and to see whether the features change over time. To this end, comparable corpora were used containing 9 pairs of specimens of translated and original Brazilian Portuguese narrative prose (fiction) dating from the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. The methodology consisted in the employment of NLP techniques and statistical measures as a complementary method of analysis. The results obtained confirmed only the validity of the simplification hypothesis.