CENSORSHIP OF TRANSLATIONS IN LATVIA: A Historical Perspective

In the 20th century Latvia experienced rapid political changes and numerous political regimes, each of which practised a specific form of censorship. In some instances, translation was fully governed by state censorship, whereas in others, censorship was a discrete outside force, The most comprehensive, sophisticated and laborious one was the Soviet censorship which also underwent evolution and occasional zigzags, demonstrating a plethora of manipulations. An interesting aspect of translation censorship is its (in)visibility to the reader, here tsarist Russian censorship comes out as the most visible. Externally imposed censorship had some similarities-expunging ideological unmentionables (Jewish and communist ideas for the Nazis; anti-Soviet, liberal, modernist and erotic components for the Soviets). While German occupation censorship relied on publishers to know what could be translated, Soviet censorship was all-encompassing, centralized and Latvian translations had to imitate and replicate patterns of Soviet Russian translations. We also see a blending of censorship with editorial work.