This paper illustrates how Italian and Danish language users, when coding the same conceived situation involving spatial relations, differ systematically in their way of construing these – as the comparison of examples from Italian and Danish original texts and their translations will show. Structural and normative restrictions (very often related to the use of spatial particles, i.e. prepositions and locative adverbs) give rise, in Danish, to a persistent foregrounding of the spatial and immediately perceivable features of the scene, while in Italian attention seems focused on the interactional relations between the entities. Should the translator adopt or, on the contrary, try to resist the conventional imagery (in this case, +/- spatial) of the target language?