This paper explores the Russian-sounding component in Nadsat, the ‘slang’ invented by Anthony Burgess for the juvenile thugs of his dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange and the challenges it poses in translation. The novel appeared in 1962 and ranks among the best novels written in English. Russian is the essential building block of the Nadsat. Enigmatic for English speaking people, it raises serious issues in translation, especially if the latter is rendered in Russian or in another Slavic language, such as Bulgarian. The analysis will start from the motives that prompted Burgess to endow his characters with a cryptic language and to choose Russian for building it. The composition of this lexical layer and its incorporation into English will be examined, in order to analyze after that the solutions found by the translators into French, Russian and Bulgarian to replicate the effect of this Russified vocabulary in their translations. Our observations will be based on the translation of Georges Belmont and Hortense Chabrier, published in 1972 in France under the title L’Orange mécanique, the translations of Vladimir Bošnâk and Evgenij Sinelʹŝikov, both issued in Russia in 1991, and the two versions of Mariana Ekimova-Melniška’s translation, edited respectively in 1991 and 2009 in Bulgaria.