translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

act of reading, or the very public one of translation, however cumbersome
due to the intricacies of language or the censorship involved they may be.
Interested in dictatorial regimes, a subject presented in parodic and
parabolic fashion, George Orwell uses his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four to
propose a utopian model of reorienting communication towards another
code than the habitual one. From this perspective, his merit lies in the fact
that he has brought to attention the danger of distancing speakers from the
meanings of words and the abandonment of common language use with a
view to adopting a code meant to impose ideology. Orwell’s model
demonstrates an extraordinary intuition, which captures the notion that the
mechanism of a new (political) language sets the goal of paralysing reason
and of destroying, through politically biased translation, everything that
world culture has contributed with. His Newspeak is mechanical, frozen in
clichés, exclusively transitive (allowing no reflexivity), built to efface not
only the differences among speakers, but also any traces of tradition and
the past.
A vehicle of ideology, Newspeak reflects on the spectacle of his (and
our, since the book has the value of a premonition) political context. Words
become weapons which contribute to the alienation of language. Their
meaning is distorted by the totalitarian ideology, the vocabulary being
constantly enriched by the violation of word meaning in current use and
the invention of new words that the writer calls prêt a penser because they
no longer permit the manifestation of the emotive function of language.
Fictional, of course, is the total abandonment of old patterns of linguistic
expression (impossible to achieve in a real life context), which Orwell uses
however to somehow underline the extremism at work within all kinds of
imposition.
Newspeak is introduced early in the novel, which opens with a
zooming in and out of the London of Oceania so as to capture Winston
Smith, the central character, in its midst. As the latter looks through the
shut window-pane (no accidental symbol!), his eyes rest on different
corners of a world he no longer recognises as his. From among the
buildings in front of him, the one that attracts his attention is The Ministry of
Truth – Minitrue, in Newspeak*. (Orwell, 2000: 744) Immediately, the reader
is sent to the footnote which says “Newspeak was the official language of
Oceania. For an account of its structure and etymology see Appendix.”
(744) At the end, the Appendix postulates The Principles of Newspeak. (917-
925) It is particularly this section (peritext) that we intend to dwell on in
developing the arguments for sustaining that communication through and
against language is a political act that literature does not hesitate to
foreground for the sake of formulating subtle observations on the quality of
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