A world without God

This article presents a small part of a larger research project focussing on the specifics of translated juvenile fiction in a communist country. The reflection of ideology and values of the target society is demonstrated on the Slovene translation of Felix Salten’s Bambi (1950), one of the most popular books for children in the Socialist Republic of Slovenia in the period from the 1950s to 1980s. The analysis of the translation revealed an omission of the religious ending, i.e. an ideological intervention that was in line with similar interventions found in other translations of children’s literature created in socialist times. Based on the interviews, translation analyses and historical evidence, it is argued here that the consistent displacement of religious elements in juvenile translations in the socialist Slovenia is a result of self-censorship and that, despite the absence of any kind of official censorship, the translator of Bambi and other translators of children’s literature were lead to act in an almost uniform way by a specific translator’s habitus.