Starting from a particular experience (the translation of Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms for a production by Matthias Langhoff in 1992), the translator attempts to convey the solutions she found to transpose the Anglo-Irish used by O'Neill as a poetic language. It seemed feasible to transpose the duality of this English sociolect, marked as it is by Gaelic structures, by using the French language, marked by Breton structures, as it is still spoken in Brittany. Use of a living language (a language therefore having its own coherence) and reference to a similar situation of impossible sharing between two languages had not only the advantage of producing a tracing of the original, but also of enabling a break with the linguistic norm. It is this break, accepted for the sake of efficiency, that made it necessary to translate the very elements that had been drawn aside by existing French translations of the play (i.e., recurrent words, the metaphoric net, punctuation and spelling) and to regard them as constituent elements that convey the meaning of the text. This very limited example consequently leads to view the problems raised by the translation of sociolects as signs of a resistance to the act of translating, inherent to the act itself.