Christopher Rundle
(University of Bologna and University of Manchester)
Online guest lecture
Wednesday 9th June 2021 at 14.00
In this guest lecture I shall compare four fascist regimes through the lens of translation: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain and Salazarist Portugal. The comparison will focus on books, because this is the field in which significant differences emerge; while policies concerning cinema and theatre, for example, tend to resemble each other more and so do not provide such an illuminating point of comparison. My analysis will be made around key themes which I consider to be particularly revealing and significant; these are: censorship policies, the role of popular literature and racism. My aim will be to show how the role that translation played within each regime can be seen as an indicator of how genuinely fascist it actually was; I intend to show that policies specifically aimed at restricting translations (as opposed to monitoring literature in general) only occurred in those regimes which adopted official racism; also that where restrictions against translation were put in place these were at least in part prompted by hostility towards popular fiction which was widely perceived as a foreign (and corrupting) import.
To conclude, I will reflect on the relationship between translation history and history, as it emerges from this case study on fascism, and consider some of the methodological implications.
Connection: https://zoom.us/j/95948500391?pwd=TnVDSVJRUTZ0WWtlOWcvZjM0TzVjZz09
Meeting ID: 959 4850 0391
Passcode: 861947
Christopher Rundle is associate professor in Translation Studies at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Italy. He is also Research Fellow in Translation and Italian Studies at the School of Arts, Languages and Cultures of the University of Manchester, UK. His main research interests lie in the history of translation, in particular translation and fascism. He is the author of the monograph Publishing Translations in Fascist Italy (Peter Lang, 2010), which was recently translated into Italian with title Il vizio dell’esterofilia. Editoria e traduzioni nell’Italia fascista (Carocci, 2019). He is co-editor with Kate Sturge of the volume Translation Under Fascism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). He is also the editor of the Special Issue of The Translator (Vol. 20 No.1, 2014) on Theories and Methodologies of Translation History. He is the editor of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Translation History; co-editor with Federico Zanettin of the forthcoming Routledge Handbook of Translation Methodology; and co-editor with Anne Lange and Daniele Monticelli of the forthcoming volume Translation Under Communism (Palgrave Macmillan). He is the co-editor with Pekka Kujamäki of the book series Routledge Research on Translation and Interpreting History; and he is the coordinating editor of the online translation studies journal inTRAlinea (www.intralinea.org).