Censorship and Ideology: The Translation of Children’s Literature in Post-Civil War Spain

This book offers a fascinating picture of how state censorship affected children’s literature translation in post-Civil War Spain. Focusing on the Spanish translations of Mark Twain’s children’s classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the author traces the evolution of the censorship system of the Francoist regime and its impact on Spanish children’s literature during the years after the Spanish Civil War. Drawing on the regime’s censorship laws, official censors’ records, and textbooks, she not only examines the censorship imposed on the translations of Twain’s works, but also offers insights into the intricate connections between state censorship and the regime’s educational aims. The book gives a revealing analysis of the ways in which the highly bureaucratic censorship apparatus operated under Franco’s dictatorship, outlining the flaws and fallacies within it, as well as the strategies adopted by publishers and translators to resist the power of the state. While centred on Francoist Spain, the book also explores broader themes of ideology, censorship, and translation, making it a valuable source for scholars of translation studies and Hispanic studies, as well as those with a wider interest in literature, history, and cultural studies.

Julia Lin Thompson is a translator and an independent scholar, who earned her PhD in August 2021 from the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. During her doctoral studies, Julia was a recipient of Australian Postgraduate Awards. Her PhD thesis, titled ＂Ideology and the Translation of Children’s Literature: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Franco’s Spain＂, examines the intersection of ideology and the translation of children’s books in Francoist Spain. Her research interests cover the fields of literary translation, comparative literature, children’s literature, and book history. Her research focuses on the translation of books for children, book censorship in twentieth-century Spain, and book censorship in post-1949 China.