In 1993, in the aftermath of the Thatcherian era, Irvine Welsh, then an unknown Scottish writer, was propelled in the high spheres of the literary scene, thanks to Trainspotting, a hard-hitting novel featuring drug-addled Scottish twenty-somethings that oppose the system the only way they can: through injections of heroin. By making them talk in an extremely cryptic version of Scots, Welsh put forth a unique discursive system that mocks both the English-speaking literary elites and the writing conventions of English. In this article, I examine the significance of the Scots sociolect in Welsh’s novel through an analysis of its socio-historical context and reception, and show how the novel’s French translators (Lindor Fall in 1996 and Étienne in 2011) produced versions that suppress the insubordination of the source text’s language. I then present a “system of textual deformation” anchored in Québécois sociolinguistic studies, that reproduces, for the French-speaking reader, the political significance and expressive strength of this cult novel’s Meschonnician voice. By using a variation of Quebec’s vernacular French as a translation tool, I strive to create a space, in the francophone literary landscape, where sociolects are no longer considered untranslatable.