The article deals with problems in translating non-standard language features. The material examined consists of translation tasks performed by trainee translators but the implications have general validity: non-standard language style is often translated literally into Chinese from European languages without any consideration of the linguistic and paralinguistic significance of the stigmatised usage in the source texts. This article discusses differences between English and Chinese as the representative of two different language families with their respective ways of presenting concepts such as tense, agreement and plurality in languages. Such differences pose great problems to translators because of the language-specific ways of expressing grammaticality and ungrammaticality. The article suggests that although formal equivalence cannot be achieved in these cases, various linguistic means in the target languages can be used to achieve or at least approximate effects.