The character of Joe illustrates how the dual function of comedy and psychological description performed by substantial speech through grammatical, lexical, phonetical and syntactic features, has to be preserved in the translation by resorting to the wide range of equivalent French substandard features. The new cultural context of translation, both in respect to the French language and the status of substandard speech in literature, accounts for the difference between the first translation by Derosne and the more recent ones by Leyris and Monod, which may also correspond to a deeper insight into the workings and aims of translation.