This paper presents a multilingual legal information retrieval system for mapping recitals to articles in European Union (EU) directives and normative provisions in national legislation. Such a system could be useful for purposive interpretation of norms. A previous work on mapping recitals and normative provisions was limited to EU legislation in English and only one lexical text similarity technique. In this paper, we develop state-of-the-art text similarity models to investigate the interplay between directive recitals, directive (sub-)articles and provisions of national implementing measures (NIMs) on a multilingual corpus (from Ireland, Italy and Luxembourg). Our results indicate that directive recitals do not have a direct influence on NIM provisions, but they sometimes contain additional information that is not present in the transposed directive sub-article, and can therefore facilitate purposive interpretation.