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The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough narrates the story of the Cleary family, Irish immigrants in Australia, and the love that Meggie, the daughter, feels for the attractive and ambitious Catholic priest Ralph de Bricassart. By resorting to the world of emotions, McCullough wrote what became a best seller: the novel was published in the USA in 1977, reaching high reading records and being quickly translated into different languages, including Spanish. When it arrived to Spain one year later, the book controlling system that had been operative during Franco's dictatorship and which was in charge of revising all the material entering the country was then coming to its end, but the novel still had to be reviewed in order to be published. A book whose main plot revolved around a priest in love with a woman and with explicit sexual and religious references would have been required to make some cuts or changes by the official readers only a few years before. However, due to the period of Spain's democratization at the time there was no problem raised about its publication and the book saw the light with no scandal. The work previously done by the translator had nevertheless something to do with this, adopting a softening strategy when the novel was too explicit sexually and linguistically and therefore making the path of publication less thorny. Translators were at the time subjected to some pre-determined practices which constituted, to a bigger or lesser degree, an instrument of social control: in the case of North American best sellers, they had the difficult task of making the text intelligible within the domestic identities constructed for the foreign culture (Venuti 1998), and they usually did it skilfully, as in the novel under study here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the "Carta de España," a Spanish journal written for Spanish emigrants living and working in other countries. It examines the role of the journal as a method of communication between the Spanish government and the emigrants, including providing information on legislation related to emigrant laws and news and activities relating to the emigrants themselves. The author analyzes the development of the journal, from its inception in 1960 until 1975, when the regime of Francisco Franco was dismantled and a democratic government was installed.

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