Censorship Evasion in Fiction Translation

Abstract

As one of the dominant discourses and a repressive act, censorship is articulated and manifested in everyday practices; however, diverse strategies have been used to escape censorship or repression since ancient times. The following questions were answered in this paper: How has censorship been practiced in Afghanistan? Were there cases (if any) where translators avoided censorship? How and in what domains have translators avoided censorship in translation? What were the strategies adopted, and how frequent were they? What were the motivations behind the evasions? To that end, translations during 1933–2021 were analyzed using the researchers’ developed taxonomy for detecting translation strategies and censorship evasion instances. It seems that the types of censorship imposed varies and shifts as the governmental administrations changed. In addition, censorship evasions have occurred in different domains of Afghan society. Moreover, Clause Structure Change was used frequently, and Cultural Censorship Evasion overrode other censorship evasion types that were identified from data. It is concluded that state codes and the types of regimes have prompted censorship evasions to a great degree.