It is widely recognized that ‘foreignization’ is a cover word which stands for different processes of cultural translation, from a problematic literalism which tends to exoticism, to ‘othering’ understood as an ethical act of respect for the other’s specificity. From a pragmatic perspective, what needs to be assessed are the reasons behind a hypothetical threshold of acceptability and the extent of the unstable and risky space where source culture expectations are challenged as a result of the translator’s management of socio-cultural biases. Starting from the assumption that cultural translation implies a metonymical move, the proposed article presents a scheme of the pragmatic and semiotic processes at work in translations from Arabic into Spanish and Catalan. A review of recent Spanish translations of contemporary Arabic fiction and the much-acclaimed Catalan translation of the Qur’an tries to show that instances of hybridization and ambivalent readings occur foremost when semiotic categories are altered as a result of the familiarization of unexpected cultural referents.