Published in 1932, the first novel of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s trilogy, Sunset Song, acknowledged as a turning point in Scottish literature, remained untranslated for nearly 70 years, mainly on account of its style: not only did the author create a highly personal style but he also intended it to be a manifesto for the literary value of Scots, which is interwoven with English in order to create a distinctly Scottish poetic prose. Since the issue of dialect translation could be solved neither by plain linguistic imitation nor adaptation into a French vernacular, it is the functionalist approach, via skopos theory, with its focus on the function of the translated text, which was chosen as a strategy by the translator.