The purpose of this study is to examine the birth of a translation industry in Italy during the fascist regime, and describe how, despite the fact that translations became the focal point for questions of cultural and political prestige, the regime took very little action to hinder their influx until the last few years before its collapse. Chapter One sets the historical background of this study with a brief examination of how the regime was put in place, the system of censorship that was applied, the regime's attempts to cultivate a fascist culture, and the developments that took place within the publishing industry. Chapter Two presents a detailed statistical view of the translation industry in Italy and compares it to other countries, particularly France and Germany. It is important when considering the debate surrounding translation and the political value that translations were to acquire to be able to have a sense of the empirical reality that the rhetoric and bluster often disguised. Chapter Three describes the birth of translation as industry and the campaign against translations that this sudden flourish in translation provoked. This chapter also looks at the relatively flexible censorship policies that were adopted towards translations. Chapter Four describes the second campaign against translations which took place after the Ethiopian war and in a political climate that was increasingly xenophobic. It also looks at how the regime made its first moves to hinder the publication of translation and the ways in which publishers attempted to resist these measures. Chapter Five looks at the final years of the regime, when anti-Semitic legislation was put in force and as a consequence books underwent a thorough "revision". It looks at how the translation question became a matter of national prestige and how the publishers were obliged to collaborate in applying a quota that would limit their number.

This study is about discourses of bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, and what they reveal about language, identity, hegemony and the production of social space. The theoretical and methodological framework I use is Nexus Analysis and Geosemiotics: approaches developed by Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004 and 2003, respectively). These approaches have revealed how and why place names, their public placement, Fascist-era monuments and bilingual education maintained a constant presence, under broader discourses on bilingualism, during the research period. Nexus Analysis focuses on social action and Geosemiotics pays meticulous attention to fundamental aspects of signs, including where they are in the material world, and how social actors interact with them. This has led to an investigation of the historical past, and how this is represented, understood and indexed in the present by those who align (or not) to ideologies of language and nation. In the complex multilingual context of this study, this approach has revealed how such ideologies are mobilized to contest ownership of geographic place and to make social space. I have traced discourses across disparate discursive genres, to reveal the complex interrelationships between language and other social semiotic data in discourses on bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen through time, and across space.