La traducción del discurso ideológico en la España de Franco
Universidad de Murcia, (2014)Abstract
This PhD Thesis aims to focus on the relationship between censorship and translation through the comparative analysis of nine English and French novels translated into Spanish and published in Spain between 1939 and 1975 (i.e. under Franco's regime). The study attempts to unveil any evidence of textual manipulation in the Spanish version of the analyzed novels, identifying —where possible— specific patterns of censorship behavior. The hypothesis postulated in the study proceeds on the premise that the Francoist censorship system used to act upon definite and standardized criteria, and predicts that the strategies employed by censors will vary depending on the ideological content of each novel. In order to corroborate this hypothesis, a corpus of nine novels has been collected and classified into three different thematic groups. The first group includes three novels characterized by their sexual content: The Last of the Wine, by Mary Renault, Sapho, by Alphonse Daudet, and The Anti-Death League, by Kingsley Amis. The second group comprises three novels that contain irreligionist material: Point Counter Point, by Aldous Huxley, La Faute de l'Abbé Mouret, by Émile Zola, and The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis. And the third group comprises three books characterized by their unorthodox political content: Nineteen Eighty Four, by George Orwell, Les Yeux d'Ezequiel sont ouverts, by Raymond Abellio, and The Invisible Writing, de Arthur Koestler. The methodological framework designed to analyze these novels combines quantitative and qualitative analysis and is based on theoretical contributions from Tymoczko (2002), Lambert & van Gorp (1985) and Leuven-Zwart (1989). This model of analysis —which is also inspired by the structure developed in Rioja Barrocal's work (2008)—, is organized into three stages: a contextualization stage, which describes the socio-cultural and historical context of each novel; an analysis stage, which explores the censorship mechanisms at use via (i) a quantitative analysis of the strategies identified (omission, substitution, amplification and rewriting) and (ii) a qualitative study that allows us to further explore the characterization of censoring patterns; and a reception stage, where the whole information output ... The overall results show that in the group of novels that emphasize sexual and religious content, omission is the predominant strategy, reaching, respectively, 79\% and 64\% of the censorship marks detected. In contrast, the political group displays a more balanced use of strategies, as omission accounts for only 42\% of the censored extracts, whereas rewriting is found in 32\%, substitution in 15\% and amplification in 11\% of the extracts. These data reflect the variation found in the patterns of censoring behaviour for each group: Francoist censors tended to delete and neutralize sexual and religious content contrary to the regime doctrine, whereas in the cases where subverting political content is at stake, a clear tendency to rewrite and generate new information alien to the original text can be observed. The main purpose of this strategy is to divert the ideological component of the source text in order to create a new favourable discourse towards the Francoist regime. These results reveal a peculiar and latent type of censorship, here coined as “metacensorship”, which goes far beyond the traditional methods, aiming not to omit and neutralize content, but rather to use and shape it with propaganda purposes.