This paper focuses on the translation of culture-bound texts in which the translator has the choice between different strategies with at one extreme simple naturalization and at the opposite extreme exotization. The choice of the strategy depends on the text type which the translator wants to produce in the target language, and consequently, on the target readers that he has in mind. The Dutch novel Max Havelaar contains elements of the Javanese and the Dutch cultures and is therefore particularly appropriate for a study of the problems caused by cultural transfer while translating. The analysis of the way two translators of this book into French have rendered the different types of cultural - geographical, historical, economic, social and linguistic - elements reveals that they have applied opposite strategies; their target texts belong to totally different types, viz. a novel and a document.