Translation as censorship: Rewriting Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in Albanian
Translation as censorship: Rewriting Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in Albanian

Summary/Abstract: Contemporary theory understands translation as a form of rewriting, where the translator interprets the original text consciously or unconsciously. Censorship is a form of rewriting that deliberately blocks, manipulates, and controls the stream of information from the source to the target text. Under the communist regime, censorship of literary texts in Albania was strict and instituted through a single state-owned publishing house with the right to publish all genres of literary works. Arthur Miller was among those playwrights whose plays were translated and staged both before and after the fall of the regime. The paper investigates the modes of institutional and individual censorship by comparing Albanian translations of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible produced in different socio-political contexts. The analysis focuses on the omissions, expansions, additions, and other translation procedures employed to domesticate, simplify, manipulate, and rewrite parts of the play in conformity with the philosophical, cultural, educational, social, and political context of the time. In the 1973 translation, religious and obscene content was avoided through different translation procedures, with some paragraphs and passages being simplified, rewritten, or entirely omitted. In the unpublished 2011 translation, the stage director and the translator preserved the title of the 1973 version in conformity with the established image of the witches and the puritan village of Salem. The analysis reveals the different ways agents of power, victims of power, translators, and censors shaped censorship and self-censorship practices.

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