During the Lebanese Civil War, different pronunciations of the Arabic word for tomato, pronounced as either “bandora” or “banadora” depending on one’s dialect, became revelatory markers of political affiliation. In the context of that war, a wrongful pronunciation at an inopportune moment was a death sentence. This paper considers the question of linguistic authenticity by exploring the difference between translational failure and translational equivalence. Using Emily Apter's concept of translational failure, I consider how accent and dialect operate as markers of gender, class, nationality and political affiliation. In considering this question, I will look specifically at Hanan al-Shaykh’s novel Innaha Landan ya Azizi/Only in London in order to examine how accent and dialect function as mechanisms with which alterity is policed and managed in the post-civil war context of migration in the novel.