Rhyming slang is one of the most colourful and culture-bound categories of word-formation in English. The make-up of the rhyming slang phrase and its dual function in literary and film discourse as a social marker and a form of verbal play often pose a tough challenge for translators. The purpose of this paper is to examine the major formal, semantic and pragmatic features of rhyming slang and to analyse the main problems encountered when rendering them into Spanish. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of different strategies for dealing with this problems, the author draws on a corpus of literary and film texts and explores the extent to which their Spanish translators succeed in capturing the full savour and zest of rhyming slang.