The paper investigates the ways in which Serbian regional verbs, particularly the ones coming from the south of the country, are translated into English. Its primary goal was to investigate the differences in competence between regional groups of translators, who were given the task of translating the most frequent regional verbs of the south of Serbia. Our secondary goal was to explore the connection between unusual sound clusters and the results of the translation process, as phonaesthetic properties of different sounds seemed to exert influence over the way in which our respondents approached the verbs containing those sounds. The study was motivated by the fact that the translators and especially interpreters usually hired for foreign officials’ visits to the south of Serbia proved to be incompetent for translating region-specific lexical items. Three groups of Serbian translators were given the task of translating the selected verbs from Serbian into English and the results were compared and analysed. As expected, the group of future translators from the south proved to be the most efficient in the task of translating regional verbs. Secondly, our qualitative analysis showed that there were numerous instances in which phonaesthesia played an important role in interpretation and translation. However, phonaesthetically driven responses could never really compensate for the lack of “regional competence.”