This paper is concerned with the problem of choice in translation, but his perspective is a theoretician’s rather than a translator’s or addressee’s. The phenomena discussed are culture-specific designations (realia) in Hannu Salama’s texts and their German translations. The translator’s choices are described against the overall fictional contexts which the target texts evoke. Instead of an orthodox target-text oriented method of analysis, however, Kujamäki argues for an eclectic procedure which entails, among other things, a straightforward comparison between the source text and the target text and thus enables the analyst also to make generalizations about the translatability of realia.