ABSTRACT
Intercultural translation transfers foreign ideas, whether they are scientific, political, literary or cultural, from one socio-political context, i.e. State, to another. Political censorship is often associated with dictatorships, such as Salazar’s Portugal, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany and Vargas’s Brazil. This chapter provides a rapid overview of socio-political censorship in Ancient Greece and Rome; religio-political censorship by the Catholic Church since the Renaissance, and in modern Islamic states. The overarching goal of censorship exercised by religious and State authorities is to enforce conformity to an identity that they are seeking to preserve, if not nurture. In Athens, the cradle of democracy, censorship was an accepted means of enforcing the ingrained orthodoxy of what it meant to be Greek. The Athenian Plato is the first philosopher to have formulated in writing a rationale for intellectual, religious and artistic censorship. The Catholic Church responded to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press by increasing censorship in Britain and Europe.
