Selecting the appropriate translation strategy during the process of translation has always been one of the key issues of translation theory. Different aspects influencing the choice of the translation strategy have often been discussed. These are the general properties of the text (the type of the text, its pragmatic features, the register, etc.), linguistic personality of the author, intentions of a translator, peculiarities of the recipient audience. In the paper an attempt is made to approach translation strategy from the point of the sociolect nature of the text, correct understanding and transmission of which becomes one of the primary tasks in the process of the translation of the text from the source language to the target language. The original Russian text of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” by A. Solzhenitsyn and its translations into English, performed by T. Whitney and G. Aitken, as well as the novel by T. R. Smith “The Secret Speech” are the research material of this article. This article presents the results of the research showing the benefits of the strategy of functional substitution in terms of the translating of sociolect texts.