Writers in multilingual societies often develop a variety of strategies to reproduce the linguistic complexity of the situation in which they are immersed. What happens when a writer plays also the role of translator to recreate his/her reality? How does this affect the translator when translating a polylingual work into another language? This paper focuses on the different resources employed by Luís Bernardo Honwana in his collection of short stories Nós matámos o Cão-Tinhoso, where the writer himself decides whether to translate or not when reflecting the coexistence of several African languages with Portuguese.