The issue you are probably seeing is that, by default, a Translucent material’s Translucency Lighting Mode is set to “TLM_VolumetricNonDirectional” so it just kind of lights up. Changing it to TLM_Surface usually gets people what they are looking for:
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Also, the docs on Lit Translucency have some good information on this.
If you are seeing other specific issues, let us know =)