Abstract Research has shown how, in a narrative event, people give meanings to and conceptualise their experience in figurative language. The aim of this case study was to explore the figurative language which emerged in the flow of mobile students’ narrative accounts of interculturality. Pragmatic features of talk, including those specific to the lingua franca, were analysed in the participants’ use of figurative language. The data of the exploratory study derived from mobility project interviews conducted with South Korean student teachers at the beginning and end of their short-term stays in Finland. The results revealed, among other things, that metaphors of movement and force were used for ‘doing interculturality’, when the interviewees constructed themselves, others and events in figurative language in the context of the mobility project interview. Using oppositional metaphor (e.g., free-strict) as well as metonymy and hyperbole, the participants presented their views on school education, society and people in the two contexts. By exploring the narrators’ strategies for telling and their discursive construction of roles and positions, it was possible to analyse in more detail the interplay of figurative language and the narrative construction of interculturality.