Censorship in translation during Franco's regime: 1984 by George Orwell (english to spanish)

Abstract

Censorship during Franco's Spain (1936-1975) has been, over the years, a subject of study with great impact for some researchers and academics who wanted to study the effect of translations and the incoming texts from other countries during that period of time (Lázaro, 2004; Merino, 2007). One of the objectives of this research is to demonstrate how influential was dictatorship during Francoist Spain in English literature and its translation into Spanish, specially works written by George Orwell. I will be specially focusing on Orwell’s most famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four to see how it was received by Francoist Spain, as well as mentioning the censorship of other of his most controversial works. In order to achieve this aim, Jana Dvořáková’s theory about the influence of the Civil War in Orwell’s works will be of great relevance, together with the analysis of what the role of the censor is in order to apply the censorship to literary works. The main difficulty to carry out this study was to find the first editions for the different novels. I could acquire editions which the translator was the same as in the first edition, but most of them did not have all the censored parts from Franco’s period of time. Meseguer, P.’s study about translation as propaganda during Francoism years. For this study to be accomplished I started looking for basic information of how translation works and in which way can be related to the censorship. Once we had this information, was important to mention the context in which this study is developed, Franco’s government in Spain after the Civil War. And finally the comparison of the different novels in Spanish translated and censored with their original versions to discuss the results and see in what extent censorship has affected these novels coming from abroad.