Document Type
Senior Thesis
Publication Date
Spring 2024
Abstract
We tend to live under the assumption that translations will always attempt to be faithful to their original texts, blindly believing in the infallibility of the translator. However, in doing so, we ignore how translation can be used to take advantage of the reader – how can one know that a change has occurred in a translated work if they have no knowledge of the text’s original language? This paper studies the power dynamics of translation, and how it can be used as a tool to aid censorship. By focusing on translated literary works under the Franco regime, this work seeks to understand how authoritarian censorship can manipulate translations and how this unique interaction between the two can serve to silence the voices of marginalized groups and political opposition. Particularly, omissions and substitutions in the translations of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and George Orwell’s 1984, as well as the Catalonian translation of Vercors’s Le Silence de la Mer, are studied, analyzing their effects on the representation of women, Spanish Republicans, and Catalonians. This knowledge is then contextualized through contemporary forms of fascism in Spain and political censorship in the United States, urging that we are wary of the spread of neo-fascism and the use of censorship as a means of silencing others, such as the LGBTQ+ community.
Recommended Citation
Austin, Avery, "La traducción política: El silenciamiento narrativo y la traducción inglés-español bajo Francisco Franco" (2024). World Languages and Cultures Student Papers and Posters. 9.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/language_student_work/9
Copyright
The author
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Included in
Cultural History Commons, European History Commons, European Languages and Societies Commons, Intellectual History Commons, Language Interpretation and Translation Commons, Other Political Science Commons, Other Spanish and Portuguese Language and Literature Commons, Political History Commons, Public History Commons, Reading and Language Commons, Social History Commons, Spanish Literature Commons