The present article dwells upon several linguistic considerations, which arose during the translation of the novel Balerina, balerina: kratki roman written by Marko Sosic, one of the greatest representatives of the Slovene cultural panorama in Italy. The interest towards the novel was nourished by his particular style, and most of all by the different linguistic varieties used by the author, which accurately reproduce the multilingual situation characterizing the Slovene community in Italy. All of these factors required a very complex approach to translation. The paper focuses on the translation process, sociolinguistics, and, in particular, questions regarding the Italian language varieties to be used to reproduce the routine communication code of those who belong to the Slovene community. The problems of adopting a single translation method aimed at mirroring the complexity of those linguistic varieties is discussed, a long discussion of the inevitable loss in the passage from one language to the other. The paper concludes questioning the utility of the theoretical concept of equivalence in translation.
