Language appropriation and cultural elements: the limits of translation in Rushdie's The Moor's Last Sigh, Rao's Kanthapura and Mukherjee's The Middleman And Other Stories

Always poised between making losses and gains, translation does not say something exactly in a different language; the act of translating also implies creation, enhancement, transformation, movement. The faithful re-production of a text is the main aim of any translator whose real challenge, however, is the effective transmission of thoughts, cultures, identities. This goal becomes even harder to attain when translators try to measure themselves against the translation of postcolonial literature which is, in some cases, a translation itself. Starting from the theories by scholars such as Benjamin, Nida, and Derrida among others, this work aims to analyse the source language and the degree of translation problems resulting from the translation into Italian of Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, Raja Rao’s Kanthapura and some short stories from Bharati Mukherjee's The Middleman And Other Stories.