ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistics can either provide us with a total theory of translation or provide linguistic insights that help us with specific aspects of translation. The importance that we attach to language as identity poses considerable delicate problems for translators, and translation can be one element in the struggle to develop and defend languages threatened with disappearance. Social class, ethnic origin, gender, age, regional origin and professional status all cause variations in the language we use. The belle's infideles translations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century France were also based on a form of sociolinguistics. Occasionally the translator may try to find an even more radical solution to dialect translation. Gregory Rabassa, believes that 'the transfer of local or regional idioms into another language and must be listed as another of the impossibilities of translation'. In addition to types of slang being unavailable, or used to different extents, the actual purpose or the effect of slang can be different between languages.
