Censorship in Translation: Control and negotiation in contemporary China

Abstract

This paper aims to show the impact that censorship generates on the translation and reception of Western works translated into Chinese in contemporary times. The bibliographic and textual linguistic analysis points to a marked complicity between translators and censors, giving rise to a translation trend that does not always silence controversial contents, but rather opts to create, through the adulteration of the original work, discourses favorable to the interests of the Chinese political regime. Despite this, the paratextual analysis allows us to appreciate how in the selected cases clearly divergent messages have slipped out with respect to the dominant ideology. To specify the scope of this phenomenon on translation, in the future it will be necessary to increase, logically, the corpus of analysis and broaden the spectrum to all types of literary genres.