Communicative anthropology, relativism in literature and modes of censorship in translation

ENThe purpose of this study is to draw a comparative analysis between Eastern and Western cultures and ideologies during years of Cold War within the framework of cultural anthropology, descriptive moral relativism and sociological literary criticism conducting a case study on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and its two Lithuanian translations. For the aim to be achieved, the researchers set the following objectives to discuss reasons of censorship, to develop a theoretical framework for the analysis of censorship in translation and the meaning loss on the basis of Grice’s conversational maxims, and to carry out a comparative and statistical study highlighting censorship as reflected in the two Lithuanian translations of the chosen work. The novelty of this study rests on the fact that both, older and newer translations of Kerouac’s On the Road were translated by the same translator, who was influenced by the Soviet censorship in 1972 and felt free in 2009.