Focusing on the French and German translations of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, a poem whose multi-cultural and multi-lingual structure may, in a sense, be regarded as analogical to the multi-nationality both of America and the cosmopolitan metropolis of the twentieth century, the authors of this paper develop parameters for describing deviations which cultural references have undergone in translational transfer. By cultural references, they intended references to any human production, in the inclusive sense of the word. Thus, they are concerned with elements both of ideal and material culture. The corpus consists of the two French and the five German translations of the poem published between 1926 and 1988; partial translations and revised versions are also taken into account. The authors aim at proposing those parameters that are necessary and sufficient for describing how the cultural references in the poem were handled by its French and German translators.