This study presents an inclusive, multicultural model for translating culture-specific items, or for analysing such items in translations. The Cultural Turn revolutionised translation studies by emphasising the need to address culturally related issues in translation, but literary translation studies still focus on isolated cultural features, and on categorising translation strategies in terms of retaining source cultural features (foreignisation) or replacing them with target cultural features (domestication). The new model redefines Lecercle’s (1990/2016) and Venuti’s (2004/2012) concepts of ‘remainder’ to account for multicultural, transnational phenomena in the globalised, digital twenty-first century. The recognition that literary texts often describe more than one culture is developed here into the notion of a text’s cultural map — its linguistic–cultural constellation. The essence of the model lies in the identification of shared and unshared cultural components within a descriptive translation studies framework, and comparison of source and target constellations. The applicability of the model is demonstrated on the Zulu praise song Izibonga zikaDingana (Stuart 1929) and Meyer’s (2011) Afrikaans novel 7 Dae and their English translations.