This article is a summary project statement of the author's dissertation at Ege University, Turkey. It deals with the translation of discourse in narrative texts and claims that when translating between cultures with different discursive preferences the translator has a certain ‘leeway’ when reproducing the cultural embedding of the source text for target readers. The purpose of this article is to discuss this phenomenon and to illustrate the different communicative preferences between German and Turkish through the examples from the German translation of Yasar Kemal’s Yer Demir Gök Bakır (1963) and the Turkish translation of Günter Grass’ Die Blechtrommel (1959). As such, it aims to show how German and Turkish differ in the representation of social and emotional relations – a cultural difference that manifests itself strongly in the above novels and their translations. After a brief discussion of the concepts of narrative texts, culture & discourse and translation, the concept of ‘leeway’ is introduced as it manifests itself in the categories ‘personalization’ (expressed by direct address, kinship lexicalizations), ‘emotionalization’ (expressed by the use of swearwords and religious and/or blasphemic expressions), ‘routine formulae’ (figuring deixis and tense), ‘addressee orientation’ (e.g. expressed by direct address) as well as ‘non-verbal’ gestures and their descriptions.