It is an accepted view in the theory of translation that texts with fairly large intrusions of dialect or other non-standards speech suffer sizeable losses of meaning in the translated versions. Some theorists would even suggest that, together with poetry and word-play, dialect defies all attempts at translation. However, the fact that various works of fiction have actually been translated into, for example, Russian and are much read and admired in their translated versions shows that this extreme view is unfounded. But losses of meaning do occur in these cases, and it is the object of this paper to (re)evaluate these losses and their causes and to assess at least some of the implications they have for linguistic theory in general and for the linguistic theory of translation in particular. The paper is based on research performed on Shaw’s Pygmalion and its two translations into Russian.