During the years of dictatorship and the period of transition to democracy (1939-1985) all translation practices were checked in Spain by the censorship organisations of both the Catholic Church and the Government. Records from both registers are now beginning to be made accessible for research purposes and, at present, there is an increased interest in research on censorship to understand a dark period of Spanish history. In the context of Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) there has been some research carried out by TRACE (TRAnslation and CEnsorship), a research group of both University of the Basque Country and the University of Leon. TRACE has focused mainly in written translation and it is my aim to start a thorough investigation on AVT; especially on the translation for TV. The reason is that during that period of Spanish history TV was a powerful and very popular media which enjoyed a unified audience – there was nothing else available. It may be the case that the results regarding censorship could be more conclusive and stereotyped.
The presentation will focus on Estudio 1, a TV programme broadcast by TVE (the Spanish national television) based on the adaptation and broadcasting of both Spanish and foreign theatre plays, sometimes written by controversial authors such as J.B Priestley, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Miller and Noel Coward. The presentation will look at the data compilation and its preliminary analysis, the execution of a catalogue with the source and target texts, the selection of representative texts, the comparative-descriptive analysis of the selected texts and the final formulation of translation rules regarding censorship.