La censura en la traducción de Homage to Catalonia, de Gorge Orwell

Abstract

During the forty years of Franco‘s dictatorship the national literature and the translated one were under his regime‘s control. There was an official censorship which was in charge of controlling and modifying all the literature that was published in the country. In this investigation we intend to show how the censorship used to work, analyzing for this issue the censure applied on Orwell‘s Homage to Catalonia, published in Spain in 1970. With this aim this study attempts to focus on Orwell and his work (Animal Farm, 1984 and Homage to Catalonia) to discover how the censure behaves and which are its patterns. In order to do this we had to read up on this period, the author and his work, and then we analyzed the censorship procedure, comparing the English version with the Spanish one. We found out that Animal Farm had not suffered any censorship, but 1984 and Homage to Catalonia had different marks in which the censorship had modified or omitted things. Then we analyze all these marks, and in which paragraphs or words it is done and why. So, we present the results on a table showing the passage which is modified on the original version and on the translation and specifying what strategy of translation has been used for one or another passage. The main conclusion of this paper is that even with modifications and paragraphs omitted the censorship allows the editors to publish these books, and it was because they wanted to use those books with crossing-out, cuts and rewrites with propagandistic purposes for the regime‘s own benefits.