In a previous article called Quelques réflexions sur la traduction dans la contexte socio-culturel canado-québécois the author tried to probe some of the reasons for the imbalance in literary translation in Canada as between the relatively large number of works translated from French to English, and the much smaller in the opposite direction. The author advanced two main reasons for this situation: firstly, the diglossic, and thus hierarchical, historical relationship between Canada's two official languages and secondly the tendency of conservative nationalists in a minority situation to idealize their own culture and denigrate that of the majority. The aim of the present article is to apply the author's reading of the diglossic aspects of Québec's socio-cultural evolution to three texts by writers hardly known for their nationalist sentiments, namely Gratien Gélinas, Anne Hébert and Réjean Ducharme, by way of illustrating the depth of cultural alienation as seen in the symbolic clash of English and French in Hier les enfants dansaient, Kamouraska, and l'Hiver de force respectively.