Season of Migration to the North is an Arabic novel by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salah. It is based on diglossia expressed, on the one hand, by the high form of Arabic in the narrative and, on the other hand, by a mosaic of informal and regional levels. The decoding process depends primarily on the origin of the Arabophone reader. Two French translations of the novel seem to be linguistically characterised by a sparse style. The texts of the translations display, on the one hand, a terse, high form of French for the narrative and, on the other hand, informal levels which are all accessible to a Francophone reader. Does this difference of levels of language between the original and the translated texts result in an unfaithful translation?