The starting point of this article is a well-known fact: each sentence, each segment of any globally informative text brings along new elements, simultaneously picking up on semantic elements which are already present, having appeared previously. Only by combining new and old can speakers/writers create texts in which topics move on without resulting in a redundant (old-only) or incoherent (new-only) text. Such topic shifts may be left implicit. Alternatively, they may be signaled explicitly, for instance with the help of (more or less) specialized discourse markers (henceforth DMs), such as "topic orientation markers" (Fraser 2009) or "digressive discourse markers" (Traugott 2019), which we will call here "topic shifters". Our question in this paper is how topic shifts are managed in French and German, or rather to what extent they are signaled by topic shifters. More specifically, the aim of the study is to (a) identify typical topic shifters in the two languages, as well as the syntactic patterns they follow, (b) identify other possible ways of signaling topic shifts, (c) find commonalities and differences between the two languages, given known typological differences between the two-and, if possible, to illustrate the tendency for French (and Romance languages in general) to signal discourse relations more explicitly than German (and Germanic languages). In order to do this, we used English as a pivot language, focusing on three DMsa typical topic shifter, by the way (Traugott, ibid.), and two less typical topic shifters, furthermore and besides-and analyzed their translation equivalents 1 in French and German, focusing on the ones most frequently found in our corpus: German zudem 'besides, moreover', ferner 'furthermore', außerdem 'besides, moreover', darüber hinaus 'moreover', übrigens 'by the way, incidentally', im Übrigen 'incidentally, by the way' and French d'ailleurs 'moreover, besides', en passant 'in passing, by the way', à (ce) propos 'by