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As an intellectual, creative, and cultural practice with a high potential of introducing dissident and subversive ideas to a culture, translation has historically been subjected to various censorial mechanisms in countless contexts and time periods. Translation as a vessel of the foreign content, which frequently implies damage to the native culture, attracts the attention of the censor. The means of these censorial mechanisms range from monitoring and regulating translation products at micro levels to prosecuting, jailing, and even murdering translators, with the purpose of establishing a domain within which the translator is allowed to produce.
However, institutionalized censorship is not the only site of censorship, neither does it manifest itself only in the form of direct state intervention. As such, censorship practices extend beyond the straightforward form of preventive and repressive censorship (i.e., pre-censorship and post-censorship) by mostly authoritarian regimes, and encompass the subtler practice of self-censorship and broader explicit or tacit structural pressure put on translators. Particularly in socio-cultural and literary systems where censorial activities dramatically pervade many fields and discourses, translators, similar to writers, are placed in a domain circumscribed by the censorship mechanism. They can conform to boundaries and/or resist these given domains and create alternative domains in order to introduce ideas subverting or intruding the protected space. This space might consist of certain national sensibilities, socio-cultural patterns, legal norms, ideological systems, and religious convictions, and they change through time and place. Thus conceived, a study on censorship in translation could also illuminate how cultures and literatures function by casting light on the multifaceted power relations between the human agents of translation, e.g., translators, editors, and publishers, and the wielders of political power. The abundance of official records and other archival material made available to researchers after the demise of dictatorships in Europe, fall of the Berlin Wall, and dissolution of the Soviet Union contributed to the proliferation of scholarly works on censorship in general. Censorship exercised in translation in varying forms has also received ample interest from translation scholars particularly in the context of these authoritarian regimes. Regardless of the structural differences and the rigidity of the censorship systems in these oppressive contexts, it can be argued that fear of importing foreign and potentially pernicious ideas through translation results in a...