On the Other Side of the Wall Book Production, Censorship and Translation in East Germany

This chapter focuses on self-censorship in the domain of literary translation through examining a corpus comprising a novel by Emile Zola, Nana, and five of its British translations published between 1884 and 1992. It is particularly concerned with the 1884 translation because of its elements of self-censorship. The chapter discusses examples of fairly obvious self-censorship due to linguistic delicacy in Vizetelly's 1884 translation of Nana. Translational transformations in the 1884 English Nana which display ideologies in the form of opinions about certain topics generally involve a more subtle form of self-censorship as compared with self-censorship stemming from linguistic delicacy which was discussed above. Whereas the discussion of self-censorship stemming from linguistic delicacy was organized in terms of techniques and effects of those techniques, the more subtle discursive realization of ideologies in the 1884 translation of Nana is best considered thematically.