The translation activity involves much more than the simple act of transforming a text from one language to another. This industry, in the same way that education, the arts and the media, are social educators; that is, they contribute to the generation of a cultural identity and the transmission of knowledge and ideologies.

How does this happen? The answer is not limited to the fact that universal literature, whether classical or modern, whether of scientific, historical, novelistic or journalistic content, depends on the work of a good translator to spread internationally.

The key lies in the fact that the translator himself is a participatory agent in this process of transculturization. The translator has the power (not precisely the ethical and moral faculty) to print his personal stamp on the translated document. In other words, the translator can manipulate a text to soften or emphasize concepts, to add ideological touches here and there.

Maybe now this is no longer the case, except perhaps for the possible emergence of a transgressing document that is softened according to the criteria of some dictatorship in an oppressed country (which in this case would not be the fault of the translator but demands of censorship). However, for a long time, at a time when there was not so much professional rigor and peer surveillance, long before this globalized and specialized world, it was not uncommon.

It was not always a negative thing. For example, in ‘Proto-feminist Translation Strategies? A Case Study of 19th Century Translations of the Grimm Brothers’ “Sleeping Beauty”’, Karen Seago asserts the recognition of women translators at this particular time and place, making female identity visible. Some of the strategies used by these female practitioners, such as decision-making in the titles to be rendered or the introduction of feminist terminology, are discussed in Silvia Molina’s ‘MissedConnections: Re-writing Anglo-American Feminism into Spanish’.

Ibon Uribarri, in ‘Popular Culture, Literature and Translation’, also points out the link between the translating task to gender studies and feminist issues, two ever-controversial topics in translation since the 70s that have given rise to a great bulk of literature. All these essays are collected in the book ‘New Trends in Translation and Cultural Identity’ by Micaela Muñoz-Calvo, Carmen Buesa-Gómez and M. Ángeles Ruiz-Moneva. 

Indeed, translation is a powerful tool in the transmission of identity and ideology in the most varied contexts. Some authors reflects on the effect that both censure and mistranslation have had in the (wrong) reception of writers who are successful in their own culture when translated into a foreign language. According to them, this is the case of Hemingway’s work in Spain as well as no other than Shakespeare, under Franco’s dictatorship.

Another study case is ‘Religious Ideology and the Translations of Robinson Crusoe into [Ottoman and Modern] Turkish’, where Ay şe Banu Karadağ analyzes religion as one of the aspects that makes a translator more visible and, taking Dafoe’s novel as example, pays special attention to the extent to which publishing houses and translators can naturalize a text and impose their own (Islamic in this case) religious ideology, while questioning their manipulative ethics at the same time.

In short, the translator’s hand can attenuate, preserve or intensify the source text in the new communication context with extralinguistic elements imposing themselves over other considerations. Precisely for this power, the translator must conduct himself/herself with the highest ethics when performing his/her work.