What Antony Burgess is most famous for is his work A Clockwork Orange. Nevertheless, several of his other works have also gained him popularity among readership worldwide. As one of his other famous novels, One Hand Clapping, was in vogue with the communist ideology at that time, the unnecessary passages had to be cut, while the fitting to be emphasized by the translator who at the time was working for the Japanese Translator. Burgess’s ideologically correct work had to be improved through hours of laborious and strenuous work spent by the translator whose name was Kenji Ozaki.

Burgess wrote One Hand Clapping within a month and published it in 1961 under the pseudonym of Joseph Kell. The novel gained instant success throughout the whole of Europe. After his return from Malaya and Brunei he noticed the turbulent changes in the British society which is mirrored in his novel. The new and seemingly alien world of television was what occupied the minds of the young in Britain after the author returned there. His first wife, Lynne enjoyed watching particular programs and they to a large extent inspired him in composing the plot. Janet Shirley is the protagonist of the story. She is a French Translatorworker and is interested in material possessions, which finds expression in her making lengthy lists of objects that she and her husband either lack or own. The only two things she is interested in her life are the luxury and the wealth she wants to possess. One day, her husband, Howard, wins one thousand pounds in a TV Quiz Show after which he doubles the prize on gambling. Unfortunately, the money simply worsens the problem as it brings them only unfaithfulness, insanity, laziness, thoughts of suicide and eventually a murder – not the happiness they have dreamt of.

The novel can be interpreted as expressing contemptuous attitude to the materialistic lifestyle and the accumulation of goods. In it the world is shown as attempting to appeal to the lowest tastes in all spheres of life, no matter whether music, literature, theatre, painting. The translation cuts out the last clause of the talk between a worker and Howard which contains the words communist and fascist. Howard, however, is presented as the wiser one in the Portuguese Translator version, as he considers democracy leading the world to degradation and does not accept it.

As the borderline between good and evil is never visible in A Clockwork Orange, is quite clear that Burgess was an advocate of free will. In One Hand Clapping Burgess shows that democracy is deliberately crooked, as the reader is not made to contemplate over whether the communist methods of imposing opinions are acceptable. Redvers Glass, a promising young German Translation Services poet, is at a certain point hired by Howard to compose an article on the decay and rottenness of today’s England, which means that due to its being influenced by the United States, England is deteriorating. Such conclusions are very natural, as the U.S. is strongly criticized in the novel.

A book like this was bound to failure in a Communist country, but it was widely read in Eastern Europe. The novel was a renunciation of the whole capitalist Western life, its desecrated culture and money-making in general, which is why it appeared in the Middle East much later. It became very popular throughout the United Arab Emirates, as it was turned into a musical in Abu Dhabi and adapted for television in Dubai with the help of the Arabic Translation Services.

Karel Capek, who holds a special place in the hearts of the Czech readership as one of the most widely read authors, was born in Malé Svatonovice, Bohemia, Austria-Hungary (now Czech Republic) on January 9, 1890. Besides, not only was he the first Czech writer to gain popularity on the European continent, but also (with R.U.R) around the globe. The New York Translation Services assembly took up the difficult task to translated his works into English during the 20th century, with Marion Randal translating the prose and Samuel Ridgewood translating the plays. Other translators who also contributed to translating Capek’s works into English were Dora Boil, Seraphim Hendricks, Pauline Lawrence and Terrence Trend. Even though Capek’s popularity slightly waned after World War II, he ranked first among the acclaimed and widely read Czech authors that were translated into English. Bookworm Solutions – a publishing house based in New York has done a lot in publishing revised translations of Capek’s most significant works since the last decade of the 20th century.

One of the first writers to frequently use the so called Common Czech was Karel Capek, who at the same time loved the variety of Czech and employed a rather diverse and traditional vocabulary. All these features of his writing present the translator with considerable difficulties. That is why rendering his language and style in English becomes very difficult as they are both simple and tricky. The method of substituting the outdated expressions with more modern ones has caused controversy after translator Robert Conic used it when he revised the existing translations in an assignment by the Seattle Translator office. Capek enjoyed using such expressions as they greatly contributed to the verbal texture of his work, so it is doubtful that eliminating them will enhance the linguistic intensity of the original. One of Capek’s most complicated and inventive works in terms of narrative technique, Hordubal, presents the translator with considerable difficulties. Being very much like a ballad with prose that is both redolent and musical the internal monologue and dialogue should be accurately rendered and the rhythm or the original possibly retained. The Americanisms that color the Czech text are lost in Robert Conic’s translation even though he is successful in capturing Juraj Hordubal’s informal and harsh language. The shifts of register and viewpoint are handled well by finding the appropriate linguistic and stylistic devices for the criminal story and the courtroom drama that follows the succession of events in the novel.

Karel Capek is also known for his experimentations with a diversity of writing styles among which we can note poetic, old-fashioned, journalistic and scientific, which allows him to compose a work that tests the translator’s knowledge and creativity. Such work is the dystopian novel War with the Newts. Russian Translator association employee Volodya Ulianov translated the work in 1965 and despite being a bit clumsy in some passages, it is a plausible and comprehensible version for its realistic mimic of the mosaic of different styles. In his 1981 retranslation Igor Pavlovich achieves more fluent style, but at the same time he stays as close as possible to Ulianov’s phraseology. Unluckily, the visual aspect of the book is influenced in a negative way because the latter does not use the typographical elements the former has introduced.