This article introduces an intercultural model of the translation process applied to the discourse of scientific popularization. The notions of popularization and subsequent translation of specialized texts are here revisited in terms of culturally and ethnically marked deviations occurring at, respectively, intra-lingual and inter-lingual levels of cognitive and pragmatic variability. The focus of this article is therefore twofold. Firstly, it explores the intralingual deviations from the rhetorical norms of specialized registers that the text-producer carries out in order to make the propositional content and illocutionary intent of his/her popular scientific text accessible to non-specialized receivers. Secondly, it investigates the inter-lingual reformulations of such popular scientific text that translators perform by relying on their own background knowledge, or sociocultural schemata, in order to (a) interpret the perlocutionary effects that the ‘rhetorically deviating’ source-text language has on them and (b) render their interpretation into the new illocutionary force of their translations, determining processes of ‘intercultural transfer’. This pragmatic perspective on translation is then operationalized through a case study and, later, a control study, both enquiring into the schemata of translators of different ethnic backgrounds while they are engaged in interpreting and rendering into Italian a popular English text on ‘Nutrogenomics’ (i.e., the branch of genomic research affirming that the degree to which diet influences the balance between health and disease depends on an individual’s genetic makeup or ‘ethnic genotype’).