In this article Schäffner and Herting compare a French and German translation of the political essay The revolution of the magic lantern by Timothy Garton Ash. Because of the high degree of culture-specificity of this essay, the authors expect to find a number of translation strategies to mediate between cultures, including socio-political structures, value systems and ideologies. To test their hypothesis, the authors illustrate the following strategies: displaced situationality and information distribution; socio-cultural background knowledge; and polysemy and word play. Although translation strategies of adding, deleting and changing information were found in both translations, the authors could not point out many compensations for missing background knowledge. They attribute this phenomenon to the topic of the text which both German and French readers were familiar with, and to the textual makeup of the source text: the source culture is not identical to the culture reported about, which is therefore for the most part explained.