Translation is a difficult process which requires lots of skills and expertise if one is to become a successful translator. It is a great challenge for the Italian translator on both linguistic and a cultural level to translate the works of V.S. Naipaul. Naipaul’s prose is characterized by terseness and detachment, so the translator must cope with a versatile world rendered through many nuances when he/she is to apply the Italian Translator. The translator uses a diversity of “deforming tendencies” in order to restrict the linguistic variety inherent in the source text and to limit the language and cultural barriers of the text, argues Frenchman Antoine Berman – a historian, theorist of translation and a translator himself. In 1985 Berman did research entitled “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” in which twelve tendencies were advanced. Denaturing the source text may be only one of the negative effects that not knowing them may lead to. Thus instead of receiving the foreign culture, translation reverses it, naturalizes it and makes an official act that is trying to make a person a native of a country that is certainly not his/her homeland. Berman suggests that translators had better use the notion of “the properly ethical aim of the translating act: receiving the Foreign as Foreign” so that they could not be tricked into being cheaply deceived.
Another instance that poses similar questions is Anthony Burgess, who is known in Poland mainly as the author of A Clockwork Orange. But does the Polish audience identify with Kubrick’s film or Burgess’s book? Few people would venture to tell for sure. Four of his novels have been translated into Polish using Polish Translation: The Wanting Seed (2003), Man of Nazareth (1995), A Clockwork Orange (1991 and 1994) and One Hand Clapping (1976), but only The Wanting Seed, One Hand Clapping and A Clockwork Orange have gained popularity among the audience. It is namely these novels that have turned Burgess into a writer whose images of the future are dark and gloomy. However, it would be the wrong approach to consider this image the only possible one, as it offers only a limited selection of Burgess’s works. Picking out A Clockwork Orange or The Wanting Seed for translation is not surprising while One Hand Clapping appearing in this famous is less astonishing bearing in mind that in Burgess’ words it “sank like a stone” both in Britain and in the United States.
Never is the barrier between evil and good a simple affair in One Hand Clapping and A Clockwork Orange. This is why we may argue that Burgess is the champion of free will in both novels. Democracy is deliberately twisted and the reader is left with the impression that the communist methods of imposing opinions are acceptable. The novel places in a characteristically gastronomic context the Russian Translator. One sentences says, “Since were well-off, I got dinner ready, as I’d brought some tins of Russian Crab, which cost a fortune at that time, probably because I liked the idea, and we ate it some potato salad seasoned with vinegar.” The Polish translation changes into: “I got our supper ready now and, as we were in the money, I’d brought some tinned Russian Crab, very expensive, and we had it with vinegar and tinned potato salad.” The semantic transition is preserved in the ideology; Russian crabs are expensive because they are products of top quality, not because of the trouble to find – so they are not something to be afforded by foreigners.