Measuring the effect of censorship on translation flow

The intensity of translation flows between national literatures is defined not only by symbolic value, but by politics as well. State censorship is the most obvious limiting factor for the incoming translations. In this paper, I propose a method to estimate the strength of the negative effect of censorship on translation flow using bibliographic data on published translations. The foundational idea of the suggested measurement is that engagement with a foreign literary field is reflected in the publication of works by contemporary writers. Higher political pressure would mean less publications of contemporary works. I argue that vitality coefficient — a proportion of works by authors who were alive at the time of publication of the translation — is indicative of the strength of the political censorship. Translations of children’s books into Russian in the USSR during the period of the Cold War will serve as a case study. Quantitative analysis is enabled by the availability of comprehensive bibliographic data. The effect of the censorial barriers associated with the country of provenance on the share of works by living authors in the translation flow was estimated with the help of a Bayesian generalized additive model. Results show that vitality coefficient responded to the political alliances and hostility dynamics during the period in the predicted way: higher levels of confrontation led to lower share of the contemporary works in the translation flow. This fact helps realize a side effect of the political censorship barriers that is not much talked about: by hindering the publication of current authors, censorship reinforces the position in the book market of the already well-established and familiar authors. If we assume that reprints contribute to the canonical status of a writer, censorship is then an indirect but real factor for canon consolidation.