In this paper we describe a study to carry out a multivariate cross-linguistic analysis of linguistic patterns across specialized parallel corpora in English and Spanish using factor analysis. First, we extracted the factors by reducing the original set of variables, formed by linguistic features, to a smaller number of factors and interpreted each factor taking into consideration the functions shared by the underlying co-occurring patterns. Then we carried out cross-linguistic comparisons of English and Spanish by comparing the identified dimensions with respect to their underlying functions, associated linguistic characteristics and the multidimensional characterization of registers included in this study.