As XML [12] becomes more popular, we expect XML documents to be stored in databases with different representations. So an important issue is to translate XML queries into the language of the database. XPath [13], the XML Path Language, is a standard for expressing navigation and selection in XML documents. Hence it can be used to specify certain kinds of XML queries. If XML documents are stored in a relational database, XPathq ueries have to be translated into SQL [11]. This paper proposes an algorithm to translate queries expressed in XPath to SQL statements. The algorithm uses information that specifies the mapping of XML documents to relational tables.