ABSTRACT
A growing body of studies focused on literary censorship in autocratic or less than democratic regimes shows more complex institutional structuring that intersects with personal choices and negotiations by various agents in the process. Censorship bodies, as archival research in translation studies shows, were made up of actual individualised bodies, censors who were not always as monolithic in their decisions and whose opinions altered with changing political and social situations. Translators' strategies are more complex, often a negotiation, and sometimes include deliberate self-censorship. Self-censorship has proven an artful form of translation, a means to get something through that might, in the long run, alter or challenge the norms and tastes of a given culture. Self-censorship can become "a force which can actively respond to restrictive limitations", so that we can analyse censorship "simultaneously as a repressive and 'creative' power, one which lies both in the hands of the translator and the censorial body".
