This contribution explores the multiple layers of irony in the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, in an attempt to discover to what extent the author's implied meaning is conveyed by the translation. The multiple layers of irony in the book come through as dialogues between various addressers and addressees. It is the authors' goal is to identify the different ironists: the author, the implied author (as defined by Booth 1961), the narrator, the characters, and the victims of the irony both inside and outside the text, so as to arrive at the global meaning and intentionality of the text (Weizman and Dascal, in press). Irony is accounted for in terms of Grice's Cooperative Principle (1975) and Sperber & Wilson’s Echoic Mention theory (1981, Wilson & Sperber 1992). The analysis, which is based on the model of text understanding postulated by Dascal and Weizman (1987, 1990, 1991), focuses on the textual features that create the ironic effect, such as register shifts and the given-new continuum.