Orwell George

Government. . .
It would have been quite impossible to render this into
Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The
nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the
whole passage up in the single word crimethink. A full
translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby
Jefferson`s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute
government.
A good deal of the literature of the past was, indeed,
already being transformed in this way. Considerations of
prestige made it desirable to preserve the memory of certain
historical figures, while at the same time bringing their
achievements into line with the philosophy of Ingsoc. Various
writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens,
and some others were therefore in process of translation: when
the task had been completed, their original writings, with all
else that survived of the literature of the past, would be
destroyed. These translations were a slow and difficult
business, and it was not expected that they would be finished
before the first or second decade of the twenty-first century.
There were also large quantities of merely utilitarian
literature -- indispensable technical manuals, and the like --
that had to be treated in the same way. It was chiefly in order
to allow time for the preliminary work of translation that the
final adoption of Newspeak had been fixed for so late a date as
2050.

New American Library New York 1961
Machine-readable version: David C. Bennett
Conversion to TEI-conformant markup:
University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center
Available from: Oxford Text Archive, A-1632-B 1994

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Final checking: David Seaman

Orwell George - 1984