In 1848, official censorship was abolished under the Habsburg Monarchy. Nevertheless, prosecutors continued to ban publication, thereby denying the reading public access to a great variety of books. Book banning and publication legislation exerted pressures on cultural procedures that took the form of a type of self-censorship in translation. As a result, translators took on the role of “gatekeepers” who, on the one hand, denied entry to ideas that were not well received by the target culture, while, on the other, allowing entry to “adapted” ideas that they had made acceptable to conform to the tastes of the reading public under the Habsburg Monarchy. Taking inspiration from Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of structural censorship, it is demonstrated how these two gatekeeping activities impacted on the respective translation strategies retained by the translators of Gustave Flaubert’s and Giuseppe Garibaldi’s novels.