Translation of Taboo Words in IRIB’s Persian Dubbed Movies

Abstract

Translating taboos presents an important challenge for the Iranian audio visual translators, and deleting them is the other censorial aspect regarding dominant social constraints. This research attempted to discover the prevailing strategies used in IRIB’s dubbed movies. To this end, the original English movies were compared with their dubbed Persian counterparts based on Sharifi and Darchinian's (2009) conceptual model. All along data collection, relying on a definite set of taboos, the 41 examples in the selected sample of three American movies were found and documented. In the present descriptive study, corpus based research is applied. After classifying the cases based on the theoretical model, taboos had been classified based on their moral, ideological, political, and social nature. The “deletion” strategy is the highest applied strategy in the translation of taboos with the highest frequency (71%). The second general strategy is “taboo to non-taboo” which includes 17%, the third general strategy is “taboo to taboo” with 9%, and the least general strategy for handling taboos is “euphemism” which is 3%. The frequency of the taboos in each of the movies, as well as their frequency in the entire corpus, was measured and discussed. General results and discussion are drawn to suggest future studies on taboo as a social and ideological phenomenon.