This article makes use of the concepts of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to compare five English and American translations of Tartarin de Tarascon by Alphonse Daudet. In order for two messages or two texts in different languages to correspond, they must, according to relevance theory, share similar explicatures and implicatures. Moreover, the effort required to process a speech act must be minimal. We have applied those concepts to the analysis of the various solutions chosen by the translators as equivalents for words and expressions characteristic of Southern France and Provence, found in Daudet's text. Some of the American translations maintain a relatively high number of foreign terms. Relevance theory applied to translation shows that there are advantages to keeping those expressions in the original language.