The main focus of this study is to analyse the translator’s challenges and which translation strategies may be relevant when translating cultural references and colloquial expressions. The corpus is an extract of a French lifestyle book about weight loss published in the 1990’s which has been translated into Swedish. The function of this text is mainly operative with the aim to influence the reader but it contains also characteristics of informative and expressive function. Several translation theorists have been consulted for this essay about what translation is, the translator’s different choices and the difficulty of translating culture. The analysis method in this study is mainly based on Brynja Svane’s theories in Hur översätter man verkligheten (2002) on how to translate cultural references and the seven strategies developed by her. The analysis showed that the strategy the most used for cultural references in the translation was that of conversion while the strategy of equivalence was the most used for colloquial expressions. The conclusion drawn from this study is that the translator needs a good knowledge about the source language and culture to be able to translate in a way that works in a new culture.