This article explores the difficulty of translating local expressions and value systems generated by a war-torn society. As a case in point, we shall focus on two Northern Irish novels and their German, Spanish and French translations. Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996) and Colin Bateman’s Divorcing Jack (1995) belong to the so-called “Troubles novels” (Kennedy-Andrews, 2003), that is Northern Irish prose dealing with the consequences of political violence. Working with Northern Irish literature, the translator is confronted with the difficulty of transposing specific perceptions and world views into a different cultural environment, very often an environment in which many Northern Irish concepts do not mean anything at all. This task becomes particularly challenging if the members of the target culture did not experience long periods of political turmoil. Our argument shall be based on Lawrence Venuti’s concept of foreignisation and domestication, as well as on Marianne Lederer’s and Danica Seleskovich’s Théorie interprétative. We attempt to demonstrate how insufficient knowledge of the local situation might lead to mistranslation.