Systematic research on translation and censorship in Francoist Spain started roughly ten years after the dismantling of the regime’s censorship apparatus in 1985, following the opening of the censorship archives at the Archivo General de la Administración (AGA) in Alcalá de Henares. Since then, numerous comprehensive studies on the translation of various genres have been produced, all of them making extensive use of the censorship files issued and archived by the regime as their main source of information. However, little to no reflection has been done on the structure, usefulness and reliability of those data. This paper examines archival sources in translation and censorship, delving into the AGA’s history and structure, as well as its unique position as a censorship repository. It describes the AGA’s document collections on censored cultural artefacts and the possibilities they afford to study the impact of censorship on the translation of various text types. Ultimately, it argues that while AGA data have proved to be a key component in censorship research in Spain, complementary information is essential in reconstructing translation activity at the time and to ascertain how textual changes observed in censored translations came about.
AbstractThis study examines how creative solutions to translation problems are negotiated and selected in ‘poettrios’
(teams consisting of a source poet, a target-language poet and a bilingual language mediator working from pre-prepared, literal
translation drafts of poems), and compares creativity in this mode to that in solo poetry translating (Jones 2011). The interactions and outputs taken from real-time recordings, work-in-progress drafts and
participant interviews from several poettrios translating original poems from English into Dutch and from Dutch into English in
two workshops were coded and analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results show that creativity in poetry translating is
an eminently cognitive activity in which creative solutions typically emerge through the incremental contributions of the
complementary expertises of the individual poettrio members, with occasional radical leaps. In this incremental scaffolding
process, and similarly to solo translating, poettrios first consider non-creative options, then creative adjustments and, finally,
creative transformations. Radical solutions are generally only accepted when a departure from the source-text surface meaning
is deemed necessary to achieve the double aim of retaining the source poem’s message while producing an acceptable poem in the
target culture (Holmes 1988).
In the years immediately following the Spanish Civil War, the domestic poetry market underwent a lengthy and traumatic transformation stemming directly from the conflict and the Francoist regime’s implementation of systematic censorship. The death and exile of many of the preeminent poets from previous generations, along with the closure and relocation to Latin America of many publishing houses, left a considerable cultural void which would be partly filled with translated texts, most of them from authors writing in English. This article outlines some of the main results of a comprehensive study into the impact of censorship on the Spanish translations of English-language poetry between 1939 and 1983. Although the quantitative data point to a high authorisation rate for translated poetry, the regime used several mechanisms to curb the public’s exposure to ideas deemed harmful which profoundly impacted the translation and reception of those texts.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.