This paper focuses on the task of bilingual clustering, which involves dividing a set of documents from two different languages into a set of thematically homogeneous groups. It mainly proposes a translation independent approach specially suited to deal with linguistically related languages. In particular, it proposes representing the documents by pairs of words orthographically or thematically related. The experimental evaluation in three bilingual collections and using two clustering algorithms demonstrated the appropriateness of the proposed representation, which results are comparable to those from other approaches based on complex linguistic resources such as translation machines, part-of-speech taggers, and named entity recognizers.