Abstract

The relationship between Francoist censorship and translation continues to attract the attention of researchers attempting to shed light on the role played by translation under Franco’s regime. The main purpose of this paper is to reflect on methodological aspects and review the different proposals of researchers studying the impact of censorship on the translation of books at that time. To this end, this study will explore three of the main models used: those based on the archives held at the General Administration Archive (AGA), those based on textual analysis and those advocating mixed models combining quantitative and qualitative studies.

Keywords: censorship, francoism, literature, methodology, history, translation

1. Introduction

Censorship is a complex act which is difficult to trace and whose consequences are hard to evaluate. It is also a primitive act, which has evolved in terms of its practical application, albeit remaining subjective and irrational by its very nature. This may explain the difficulty encountered by those attempting to systematise, define and classify censorship and its implications in the field of literary translation. Despite the novelty of the contributions of those authors who have addressed the phenomenon (Dunnett 2002; Merkle 2007; Billiani 2007), the truth is that to develop a model of analysis that allows researchers to identify, characterise and quantify censorship in the translation of a given text has become a difficult challenge. In this work the focus of this inherent complexity is censorship during the Francoist regime. There are several factors that make the Francoist a particularly complex censorship system: from its establishment, on an intellectual and cultural wasteland; through its development, affected by the various political upheavals that shook the country for almost four decades; to its consolidation, in which all the participants in censorship -whether voluntarily or out of fear of reprisals- ended up internalising the censorship criteria set by the Administration. This gives Franco's censorship a heterogeneous dimension that renders any attempt at systematisation -in this case, the impact of censorship on the translation of books- ever harder. The aim of this study is to review the different proposals of researchers who have aspired to unravel this phenomenon and to reflect on the relevance and appropriateness of the methodologies used. Therefore, in the following sections we will explore, in the first place, the reaction mechanisms set in motion at a legal and institutional level to neutralise any dissident way of thinking that may have tried to filter through foreign literature; secondly, we will review the different methodological proposals to study the relationship between translation and Franco’s censorship. The purpose of outlining a methodological scenario is to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of the various analysis models proposed to date to best recreate, as Munday puts it (2014), ‘the micro-history of a translation process of a book’ and get then a little closer to the reality of that time.

2. Franco's censorship system

The peculiar circumstances surrounding the establishment, growth and consolidation of Franco's censorship system effectively bestow upon it a complex and unique character. The repression that followed the Spanish Civil War prompted many intellectuals to flee the country, leaving behind a void that would pave the way for building a new cultural reality on the foundations of the Franco regime. Andrés Sorel alluded to this harsh reality by stating that ‘And what death did not drag down, exile conquered’ (2009: 5, my translation). Through tight control aimed at filtering contaminating material from across the border, censorship sought to establish the values proclaimed by the regime by bringing about a coercive or prohibitive period (Savater 1966). With the 1938 Press Law and inspired by Italian and German propaganda models (Cisquella et al. 1977: 19), censorship became institutionalised.

Despite the difficulties in outlining any defined criteria that went beyond the subjectivity of the censors themselves, there was consensus on the issues to be censored. For example, in the early years of the dictatorship, censorship focused almost exclusively on direct attacks against Franco and his regime, as stated in article 18 of this law, which specified ‘writings that directly or indirectly tend to diminish the prestige of the nation or of the Regime, hinder the work of the Government or sow pernicious ideas among the intellectually weak’. According to Abellán (1980: 193), there was a ‘perfect osmosis between civil and ecclesiastical censorship’, which was reflected in the prohibition of works and authors considered subversive and in the appearance of conventional publishing houses that prioritised the publication of certain works that were more akin to Franco and the allied totalitarian regimes (Ruiz Bautista 2008).

In order to harmonise these criteria, a questionnaire was submitted to the censors to obtain yes or no answers to questions such as, Does [the work] attack Dogma? Morality? The regime and its institutions? The people who collaborate or have collaborated with the Regime? The questionnaire then came to a conclusion that could either be favourable (authorising the work or authorising it with deletions) or unfavourable (rejecting it with or without denunciation and/or inclusion of the author in the list of ‘cursed authors’). This first assessment by the censor was then submitted for ratification by other agents involved in the process, namely specialised readers and those responsible for the censorship (Abellán 1980: 8).

The pressure on the publishing sector was such that publishers went so far as to contribute to the cause by censoring the texts they wanted to include in their own catalogues. One of the measures brought about by this first Press Law, the so-called ‘prior censorship’, obliged publishers to submit a copy of the work they intended to publish, which then would become subject to any deletions that the assigned censor considered appropriate. Consequently, editorial censorship further reinforced official institutional censorship. The vicissitudes of the national and international situation, however, forced the Franco regime to render a more open-minded image abroad, resulting in the enactment of the 1966 Press and Printing Law. This law, however, was nothing more than an attempt to whitewash the image of the regime, since it merely shifted responsibility to the publisher, bringing about a period of indoctrination (Savater 1996: 9).

Among the measures approved by this new law was the introduction of ‘voluntary consultation’, whereby publishers were no longer obliged to submit their editorial projects to censorship. But the publishers were more suspicious than ever and were already presenting watered-down manuscripts in order to avoid heavy fines or the seizure of works, which could happen if the published work was considered by the Administration as out of line with the ideological standards of the time (Abellán 1982). Consequently, the publisher was forced to take part in this repression, in turn putting pressure on the translators to treat certain subjects with the utmost care. According to Cisquella et al. (1977: 73), ‘the application of the Press Law normalises in some way the diffusion of ‘cursed’ subjects for years, but does not consent even the slightest in others’, such as works dealing with the history of Spain and the political regime in force after the victory in the Civil War; issues relating to communism, anarchism, sexuality, religious texts; or references to morals and customs. This editorial and translator self-censorship led to a rise in internal censorship, which was reflected in a fall in the number of rejections and an increase in ‘administrative silences’, an inhibitory measure for which, once again, the publisher was ultimately responsible (Abellán 1980). Censorship included a number of agents who ended up becoming participants in this cultural and intellectual repression. By involving all such participants in the editorial process, the censorship apparatus thus provided a certain coherence to the treatment of the material for publication Therefore, beneath a seemingly secondary issue such as the characterisation of self-censorship in terms of authorship, lie all the difficulties to be faced by those of use attempting to explore this field of research. It might therefore be rash to suggest that the sole intervention of the translator acting on his or her own initiative should be seen as an agent of reproduction of the dominant discourse. Instead, it would appear that both the standards in use and the margins of what was socially acceptable were gradually passed on from the censorial institution to the different links along the publishing chain, illustrating the sociological dimension that came to condition translation as a product and process under Franco’s dictatorship. This dramatically blurs the tracking of the censorship carried out, in line with Bourdieu’s theory (1991), which argues that as the mechanisms of internalisation are reinforced, the need for explicit -and therefore trackable- control imposed and sanctioned by an institutionalised authority is diluted.

3. Measuring the impact of Franco's censorship on the translation of books

Francoism is a field of study as extensive as it is interesting for researchers, both within and beyond Spanish borders (Rundle and Sturge 2010; Seruya and Moniz 2008; Vandaele 2015), who seek to clarify the impact of censorship and the role of translation in repressive contexts. Attempting to measure this impact becomes an arduous task and poses a methodological dilemma. Once contextualisation work has been carried out, researchers face the challenge of selecting the approach that best suits their research objectives. In this section we present three of the main methodologies used in the investigation of the impact of Franco's censorship on the translation of books: those based on the files of the General Administration Archive (AGA), those based on textual analysis and those advocating mixed models combining quantitative and qualitative studies.

3.1 Documentary evidence: censorship files

Many of the studies that seek to measure the impact of censorship on the translation of books during the Franco regime take as their starting point the official censorship archives of the AGA, invaluable evidence for any researcher seeking, on the one hand, to learn about the administrative procedures surrounding the publication of a certain book and, on the other hand, to unravel the complex functioning of the censorship apparatus. The archives are also of significant evidentiary value when measuring the impact of censorship on translated texts. In fact, as a general rule, it is very likely that any censorial action will be reflected in these documents: firstly, in the questionnaire and report from the censor that included replies to specific questions in order to provide a general assessment on the possible dissident nature of the work; and, secondly, in the galley proofs - when available-, which would corroborate any potential deletions proposed by the censor. Using this methodology, certain authors have yielded interesting results: in her study on the translation of Camus, Cruces Colado (2006) travelled along the different stages underwent by the works of the French Nobel Prize winner, offering a glimpse of the disparity of opinions between the censors and the arbitrariness of the system; the work of Godayol (2016) revealed the different treatment of the Catalan translations of six works by Simone de Beauvoir before and after the 1966 Press and Printing Act; whereas Julio (2018) discovered in the translation by María Luz Morales of Mariana Alcorofado's Lettres portugaises, (the epistolary relationship between a nun and a military man), that the editorial project elicited disparate reactions among the censors.

Despite the valuable information contained in these files the information is, on occasion, as authors like Jané-Lligé (2016) point out, non-existent, brief, insufficient or contradictory. Many questions arising from research of this nature remain unresolved: for example, how does the researcher know that the work in question had not passed through a previous filter of internal censorship? Are the censor's guidelines always complied with? Did the work reach the public in the exact form recommended by the Administration? Or was it subjected to further remodelling, perhaps undertaken by the publishing house itself? Most of these questions can be solved with a textual analysis of both the original and the translated work, which is another of the methodologies employed by researchers interested in exploring this complex relationship between translation and censorship.

3.2 Manual analysis: the comparative study of ST and TT

Focused less on the publication process, this methodological aspect centres on the end product, that is, on the censored version of the work. As stated by Abellán (1987), a simple comparison of the original version and the translation is enough to discover the impact and degree of censorship. Pegenaute (1992) was one of the authors who, during the nineties, along with scholars such as Pajares Infante (1992), Toda Iglesia (1992) and Lanero Fernández and Villoria Andreu (1992), relied on these meticulous textual analyses to detect possible examples of censorship of foreign works published at different times in Spain. This methodology allows the researcher to gather important information about a work, such as how the possible censorship-sensitive content has been treated. This can be done by scrupulous reading of the original that includes the marking of potentially subversive passages and the subsequent contrasting with the version under study, or by simultaneous reading of the whole work and its translated version. Once the controversial passages have been identified, the researcher is able to check whether any type of censorship has been carried out and which strategy has been used by the censor (deletion, modification, rewriting). If the work being studied has been subsequently published in its full version, the researcher may also resort to this version to corroborate the data extracted in a first analysis. This is therefore a cost-effective, direct and prolific methodology that requires only source and target texts, and appeals to the skills of the translator, rather than those of the historian. Perhaps for this reason many authors adopt this methodology, such as Lefere (1994), who detected the deletions that Franco's censorship made in three novels by Claude Simon in compliance with the censorship criteria pointed out by Abellán (1980), namely, sex, religion, use of language and politics. Franco Aixelá and Abio Villarig (2009) focused their study on a body of eight North American novels that stood out for their strong sexual component and the presence of vulgarisms. Through a study of the three strategies found in the Francoist versions (attenuation, conservation and intensification) and detected after comparative reading, the authors were able to verify the treatment received by these novels and the redactions they suffered under censorship. Pascua Febles (2011) also opted for this methodology in her study of the Francoist versions of Guillermo (Just William) by Richmal Crompton, revealing not only the tight control to which children's and teenage literature was subjected, but also the arbitrariness of the system. One of the most recent studies is that of Rosa María Bautista-Cordero (2018) on the translation of Adventures of a Young Man, by John Dos Passos, a novel that underwent all manner of manipulation to conform to the interests of the regime, revealing yet another case of a more insidious and powerful strategy where translation becomes a propaganda tool.

But as is the case with the methodology based on the study of censorship files, these manual analyses leave important questions unanswered, such as the impossibility of pinpointing the authors of any identified censorship. Firstly, what kind of censorship is identified in the work? Was the book the target of institutional censorship? Or was it a version censored by the publisher? There are also certain drawbacks that render this methodology a somewhat limited resource. On the one hand, it is an arduous and complicated task, usually assumed when working with a very limited number of texts. This only allows the researcher to get a glimpse of a very specific dimension of Franco's reality: a specific work at a specific time, dissociated from its general context. Therefore, drawing general and long-term conclusions will require great effort and numerous studies. In the face of such limitations and as a workable alternative to this method, we have the corpus analysis methodology. This allows, on the one hand, for an extension of the scope of the study and, on the other hand, a combination of the qualitative and quantitative approach that allows for in-depth analysis of the effects of censorship while at the same time quantifying it in statistical terms (Rojo 2013).

3.3. Studies based on corpus analysis: the TRACE group

The research group TRACE (acronym for TRAducciones CEnsuradas – Censored Translations) has carried out invaluable work on the study of censorship during the Franco era. This group, coordinated by researchers from the universities of León, the Basque Country and Cantabria, has cleared up many of the unknowns surrounding this difficult relationship between translation and censorship at different times during the dictatorship and in different fields of study, such as narrative (with contributions from authors such as Fernández López 2000, 2005; Santoyo 2000; Santamaría 2000; Pérez Álvarez 2003; Gómez Castro 2003, 2008), theatre (Merino and Rabadán 2002; Pérez López de Heredia 2003; Bandín 2007), and cinema and television (Gutiérrez Lanza 2000). The objective pursued by these researchers is precisely to detect impact of censorship on texts from overseas and to identify the nature and degree of strategies employed by the censors. To this end, they work with a computerised corpus that allows them to carry out a segment-by-segment alignment and thus check whether any modification in the translation has taken place. The purpose of this methodology based on automatic corpus analysis is to allow researchers to empirically confirm or refute their research hypotheses and thus provide their study with a certain scientific rigour. Within the framework of Franco's Spain and the influence of censorship on translated texts, the methodology proposed by the TRACE group opened up new avenues of study for the researcher, now able to significantly expand his or her scope of study or, alternatively to carry out highly specific searches by narrowing the scope as much as possible.

Despite the valuable and enlightening nature of the method, however, not all researchers find TRACE to be the methodology that best adapts to the needs of their research. There are several reasons why the study of Franco's censorship is confined to other types of methodologies, such as those described above. Firstly, due to the use of alignment and analysis software and difficult statistical processing, this is a highly complex model that relies on technology and requires a great deal of effort and time on the part of the researcher. Let us imagine that the aim is to analyse specific textual marks that, for example, present pernicious content, whether sexual, political or religious; in this case this methodology may not be the best suited, insofar as it intrinsically involves a segment-by-segment, as opposed to contextual analysis. Analysing this type of incident in isolation can lead the researcher to misinterpret the results, something that happens for instance with the use of swear words when an omission that would initially appear to be ideological is justified by a stylistic question or a compensation that is found later in the text. Hence, translating ‘Maldita sea’ for ‘God Damn it!’, ‘Qué diablos’ for ‘What the hell’, or ‘Santo Dios’ for ‘Jesus’ may be interpreted as modification marks left by censors in their attempt to eliminate attacks against the Catholic faith, when they merely obey stylistic decisions faced by the translator. TRACE's methodological approach isolates all those segments in which a textual impact is detected, leaving its possible ideological motivation for subsequent verification. This method provides systematicity, but this does not rule out the possibility of considering the textual effect of an uprooted form of the text and therefore misinterpretation of the reason for the deletion, as some authors have already pointed out (for example, Cuníco and Munday 2007).

4. In search of a model for the study of censorship in translation

The different methodological proposals explored in previous sections have proved to be very useful for the study of the impact of censorship on the translation of imported texts during the Franco regime. However, as we have seen, each of these methodologies suffers from certain shortcomings or limitations that prevent the researcher from delving deeper in deciphering the ins and outs of this complex system.

This may be the reason why some researchers have chosen to combine some of these methodologies or even use other tools to complement them. Lázaro (2001, 2002, 2004) was a pioneer in this sense when, by combining the AGA files with textual analysis, he showed the way Franco's censorship approached the works of certain foreign authors, such as George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence and H.G. Wells. In addition to shedding light on the rules of the institution, Lázaro reflects on how censorship influenced the reception of these authors, as Laprade has shown in his study of Ernest Hemingway’s translations (1991). The reflections derived from Laprade and Lázaro’s research provide interesting data on the functioning of the censorship apparatus ‒sometimes inflexible, at other times arbitrary‒ a finding which at that time opened up new avenues of study for researchers.

Certain other authors have looked for complementary material such as addressing the work of those responsible for channelling the translation activity of the time (Jané-Lligé 2016; Godayol 2018; Santaemilia 2018). The aim here is to adopt the methodology proposed by Munday (2014) and to recreate, using all types of documentation (archives, manuscripts or correspondence), a micro-history of the translation process of a given book. For example, work by Meseguer (2015), explores the impact of censorship on texts translated from English and French during the dictatorship using a mixed analysis model that was complemented in turn by the study of AGA files and interviews with historians, editors and translators from the Franco era. The invaluable testimony of these individuals was key in interpreting the results of textual analyses and information gathered from the files of a corpus of nine novels. Among these results, those concerning the phenomenon of self-censorship stand out, something to which the translators interviewed - Manuel Serrat Crespo, Francisco Torres Oliver and Maria Teresa Gallego Urrutia - reacted with little surprise: they had difficulty imagining that the translator would act with such recklessness, but they recognised isolated instances in which the editor had pressured the translator to treat certain subjects with special care. In fact, the editor interviewed, Beatriz de Moura, admitted that publishers were subject to many pressures, such as bearing financial responsibility or seeing their editions destroyed before their very eyes if they dared to ignore the recommendations of the Administration. Historian Ian Gibson and researcher Edward Douglas Laprade -one of the first authors to address the impact of censorship on the reception of English authors- also provided interesting information on the functioning of censorship, such as the existence of established criteria, preferential treatment to certain publishers or privilege in the publication of authors sympathetic to the regime.

These are, in short, conciliatory approaches that can allow researchers to offset the limitations of other methodologies. From our point of view, the main interest is to start from the translation and compare it with the original, in order to track the censored words in the text. Comparative analysis here appears to be fundamental. Above all, it provides the best commencement, a firm anchoring point given the undeniable value that a Francoist version[1] can have when a certain discrepancy or any type of alteration is detected, in an objective and contrastable manner. In this regard, the study of the translated text constitutes an invitation to adopt an approach that seeks to delve into the history of Franco's Spain and offers, without a doubt, a fascinating perspective of the way the regime operated. In this way, the translations that were injected into the publishing market of Franco's Spain seem to be associated to some extent with the notion of the construction of a certain Francoist literature and should be considered as “regulated transformations (rather than accurate or inaccurate reproductions) of their source texts, with the criteria that define the nature of their relation to their originals deriving from the contexts in which the translations are produced” and as such are “’discourses’ of history, symptoms of the anxieties, influences and interactions being experienced by the culture in which the translations are produced” (St-Pierre 1993).

Hence the social need for such research: translations performed at that time are an echo of the historic memory. Besides, the state of amnesia in which Spain is still immersed with regard to its Francoist past is such that books bearing the stigmata of the dictatorship can still be found on the shelves of libraries and bookshops today, a debt to Spanish readers and universal literature that must be paid off once and for all. We also advocate manual analysis, because literature is substantially alive, a malleable and too volatile material to be partitioned and pre-conditioned into segments before being subjected to computer processing without losing any nuances. Another important reason is that our field of expertise is first and foremost that of translation; unravelling the work of translators thus offers the opportunity for total immersion in the translation process. But this would be rendered meaningless if it were not accompanied by the need to try to restore, with all the extra-textual sources available (administrative documents, direct interviews, editorial archives, literary critical articles in the press of the time, etc.) the historical context and socio-cultural conditions that influenced the translation process.

In other words, in this field of study, it is necessary to work on the construction of a hybrid method which, obviously, is not confined to the simple linguistic aspect of translation studies. It is therefore important to place ourselves in an interdisciplinary perspective that can be meaningful in terms of characterising the influence of ideology on translation. And if the research interest is therefore to study, first, literary translation, second, the historical period in which it is inscribed, and third, the autocratic context that conditions literary production, it becomes clear that the methodological approach to be set up must attempt to integrate, as far as possible, a historical depth with a sociological perspective. In this way, it will be possible to offer a more complete understanding of the context, conditions, mechanisms and challenges of the reception and adaptation of foreign literature to the prevailing norms promoted by Francoist orthodoxy. In line with Merkle’s notion of "sociology of censorship" (Merkle 2006), we can in particular examine these dynamics of translation and censorship in the context of the process of configuration and institutionalization of Franco's literary field, taking into account: “the dominance of the political field that may assert control over a weaker field, such as the literary field composed of publishers, literary figures and translators, when the latter field is not autonomous” (Merkle 2006: 245). In this way, getting as close as possible to the main agents involved in the creation, control and dissemination of translated literature in this period (translators, editors and censors) might be an element that can help us to understand these phenomena of cultural and ideological domestication. It can provide us with valuable information, in the way in which the habitus of these agents came to interrelate with the Francoist literary field, given that “concept of habitus can generally be counted upon to ensure the successful perpetuation of the social (and political) order, as Bourdieu as argued in his presentation of the mechanisms of structural censorship” (Merkle, 245).

Ultimately, with this interdisciplinary focus, the aim “is to reach not abstractions, but to elucidate translation as it appears on the ground” and to maybe produce ‘thick descriptions of events’ that might be refined under some synthesis at some point in a more global understanding of this historical period” (Hermans 2012: 245). We thus approach the subversive texts that constitute the subject of our study by conceiving translation (i) as an invaluable raw material that has much to say about an ideologically controlled era and society given that, during the Franco regime, translations used to represent “in the Spanish language, one of the main literary activities, if not the first” (Ruiz Casanova 2000: 493, my translation); (ii) as an activity that should not be analysed as an inert result but rather as a socially determined dynamic process that contributes per se to the understanding of the Francoist context; (iii) as a phenomenon that must also be tackled as a political issue in the Francoist agenda, thus reflecting political implications in the interests of the regime to carry out its project of national cultural construction or at the very least to ensure the maintenance of the status quo; (iv) and as an ideological tool to reproduce the dominant discourse and the official values by integrating the implementation of censorial mechanisms and strategies designed to defend the prevailing orthodoxy.

5. Conclusions

There are different methodologies for studying the impact of Franco's censorship on the translation of works that came to us from across the border. The methodological approaches discussed here can be described as "major" (and not the only valid ones) insofar as they are recurrently used in the study of the relationship between translation and Francoist censorship. However, in this field of study as in any other, the 'right' methodology is the one that is most effectively adapted to the needs and characteristics of a given object of study and to the research objectives pursued. It is thus legitimate to think that one cannot pretend to study with the same tools and according to the same approaches questions as heterogeneous as, for example, the way in which a blasphemous word is translated in a large parallel corpus; the identification of trends in terms of censorship strategies employed in the translation of a controversial novel; or else the study of censorship files drawn up by the same censor throughout his career.

This said, while it is true that the AGA dossiers and textual analyses have demonstrated their appropriateness in these studies, it is also clear that the researcher must go one step further if he or she wants to resolve the many unknowns that arise from their results. What is conceivable now is the possibility of going back a few decades to try to reconstruct that scenario as faithfully as possible. One option is to complete these analysis models with all the information we have at our disposal. Interviews with translators and editors of the time have proved to be a good source of documentation, but there is a plethora of possibilities for the researcher, who can get even closer to reality through the work, activity and trajectory of editors, as well as that of translators, bearing in mind the socio-political context that surrounds them and all the factors that could influence their work.

The multiplication of each of these specific studies should also be seen by the researcher as an invitation to move forward, with a view to adopting a broader and cross-cutting perspective on these issues. What is at stake is to seek for a “perspective […] that provides coherence and an overarching story line” (Hermans 2012: 244), an approach that “specifically recognises the contextual nature of the criteria used to produce translations, and consequently of the translations themselves, relating these to other cultural and historical phenomena, and makes it possible to connect translations to the historical events and structures prevalent within the cultures producing them” (St-Pierre 2012: 241-42).

In this line of research, which attempts to examine the ways in which translation was instrumentalised and how the mechanisms activated by institutional censorship worked, each softened version, each infringement proceeding, each study case of a work whose subversive content was subjected to a process of adaptation and appropriation is considerably insightful. The aim here is to look for “the specific historical circumstances in which translation agents operated or explain their role within a wider understanding of that historical context” (Rundle 2012: 236). This helps us to better understand the many facets of a complex, heterogeneous, plural and elusive historical, social and cultural reality. This modus operandi has shown to shed some light on those entire pages of our history that remain hidden to date, almost forty years after the end of the dictatorship. Each case of conditioned translation thus constitutes one more micro-history that will help us in the long run to shift to a higher plane, towards a macro-perspective in this field of research. This will help provide a more precise and accurate outline of a certain Francoist literary system where translation acted as a tool of ideological appropriation and of propagandistic interest aimed ultimately at reproducing the dominant discourse in Franco's Spain.

About the author(s)

Purificación Meseguer Cutillas is a Lecturer at the Department of Translation and Interpreting at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her main research interests are literary translation, the relationship between translation and censorship, and the impact of emotions and personality factors in translation. She has written a book (Sobre la traducción de libros al servicio del franquismo: sexo, política y religión. Berna, Peter Lang, 2015) and published many articles in academic journals (RESLA, Revue Française de Linguistique Appliquée, Hermes, Translation, Cognition & Behavior). As a professional translator she has translated a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books from English and French into Spanish for publishing houses such as Tusquets, RBA or Random House Mondadori.

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