A Curious Case of Taboo Rendition in Persian AVT: A Spectrum of Ideas

The pace of technological evolution, with particular reference to mass media outlets like films, has become so fast in recent years. Such rapid progress made audiovisual translation (AVT) a hot topic. This study aims to investigate the impact of local cultural norms and translators’ hiring institutions policies on Persian audiovisual translators’ decisions in case of taboo translation. In this paper, three translations of the film named I, Daniel Blake were analyzed. The translation corpus included an Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) dubbed version, a subtitle used by an authorized private video on demand (VOD) company and finally a fansubbed version. The theoretical framework of the current study was based on Sharifi and Darchinian’s (2009) classification of taboo interpretation in contemporary Iran and Khoshsaligheh and Ameri’s (2014) model for taboo translation. The results depicted that taboo translation in Persian AVT represent an ideological spectrum going from one extreme to its opposite. This complete range of decisions in Persian AVT truly reflects a famous dichotomy in translation i.e. Domestication and Foreignization.