Translation of Taboos in Dubbed American Crime Movies into Persian

Abstract

This study aimed at investigating the strategies which Iranian AV translators use for rendition of taboo language in American crime movies dubbed into Persian. The required bilingual corpus was purposively selected based on a pre-determined set of criteria. During data collection, drawing on a Persian-specific set of types of taboo language, the 642 instances in the selected sample of four American crime movies were detected and recorded. Having analyzed the strategies in rendering the original taboos into Persian, a model of four basic strategies was empirically achieved–namely, a) translating the source culture taboo to a target culture taboo, b) deletion of the source culture taboo, c), substituting the target culture taboo with a target culture non-taboo, and d) rendering the source culture taboo to a target culture euphemism. The descriptive statistics showed that the general approach taken by the AV translators was toning done the force of taboo language, following the target culture norms especially by deleting<br><br>the source culture taboo as the most frequent strategy or replacing it by a non-taboo or euphemism, even though nearly one-thirds of the taboos were kept in the dubbed target product. The findings are useful data within descriptive translation studies; nevertheless, they cannot be generalized since the study is limited by a relatively small corpus and a non-probability sampling technique.