Salazar’s speeches in English – a view from the inside

Chumbo, Isabel

http://hdl.handle.net/10198/26236

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Authors

Chumbo, Isabel

Abstract(s)

The Portuguese Estado Novo regime has originated prolific research in the field of translation studies, particularly in literary translation. However, the translation of propaganda and political texts in general has scarcely received any attention at all. This study presents an insight into the translation of speeches delivered by Salazar into English during the 1930s, a period of intensive activity in the field of propaganda from within the dictatorial regime, mainly due to the existence of an official entity focused on that aspect. The objectives of the study are to describe how translation occurred from within the regime into a foreign language and to analyse the translators’ strategies when translating a set of speeches, which are comprised in the volume Doctrine and Action, published in 1939 by Faber and Faber in London. This work will not only focus on translation as a sociological event but also provide an insight into the speeches themselves, from the target culture point of view. Consequently, this work seeks to contribute to enlarge understanding of a specific historical context. The proposed study will be operationalized at two levels: at a macro-level, which applies to the external history of the translation in the proposed topic and, at a micro-level, applied to the internal history of the translation. The external history aims at revealing the circumstances and agents involved in the translation process. For this, we will have to rely on textual elements and resources existing in different Portuguese archives. At the level of internal history of the translation, the focus will be directed towards a set of speeches organized in a bilingual and parallel corpus of full text and aligned at paragraph level. The results will state not only what happened with regards to the translation of political texts during this timeframe but also show the outcome of the comparative analysis, which leads to the conclusion that the translators working with these texts took certain liberties culminating in a target text full of politically significant omissions and additions.