Translation and Fascism

In this chapter I shall compare the history of translation in four twentieth-century ‘fascist’ regimes: Mussolini’s Italy (1921–1943), Hitler’s Germany (1933–1945), Franco’s Spain (1939–1975) and Salazar’s Portugal (1926–1974) (henceforth I shall refer to each of these regimes simply with the name of the country) ¹ . What I aim to show is that there is a direct correlation between the extent to which these regimes were genuinely fascist and the degree of hostility towards translation. I also want to consider how the level of hostility shown towards the translations was linked to the adoption of anti-Semitic policies.