Tracking down Little Big Man into the Spanish Culture: From Catalogue to Corpus and Beyond

Authors

• Carmen Camus Camus University of Cantabria, Department of Philology

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.61200/mikael.129667

Keywords:

translation, censorship, ideology, American Western, Little Big Man

Abstract

This paper tracks down the translation of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man into Spanish during Franco’s dictatorship. The study constitutes a subsegment of TRACE (Translations Censored), a larger reseach project which studies the incidence of Franco’s censorship in the translations of different cultural areas; its methodology contemplates the compilation of a catalogue of censored translations prior to the selection of the textual corpus material. This study, framed under the Descriptive Translation Studies paradigm and using the TRACE methodology, forms part of research investigating the incidence and effects of Franco’s censorship in the translations of American Westerns into the Spanish culture under this regime. During Franco’s dictatorship publishers had to submit all works to the state censorship board in order to obtain approval for printing and publishing. In this procedure, for each individual work the censorship board opened a file where all the changes and suppressions dictated by the censorship officials were registered. From the annotations made in these files it is now possible to trace and reconstruct the changes that each work experienced in the translation process and those attributable to the state censorship procedure.