Dubbing English Culture-Specific Items into Persian: A Case of Taboos in IRIB's Hollywood Films

Abstract

Demonstrating their idiosyncrasies in a culture-specific way, cultural aspects are one of the most demanding tasks in cultural transfer, especially in rendering audiovisual materials. This study investigated the applied strategies in rendering taboos from English to Persian in 10 dubbed action Hollywood movies by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). To this aim, the original and dubbed versions of the movies were collected from Soroush Sima Company, which is a highly official audiovisual translation (AVT) company in Iran. Afterwards, the original and dubbed versions of the movies were compared seeking for the culture-specific items (CSIs), especially taboos. Then, the taboo expressions were extracted from the original versions and compared with their translations in the dubbed versions. Finally, the results were interpreted through SPSS, considering Venuti's (1995) strategies in translation studies (i.e., domestication and foreignization). Analysis of the chi-square results indicated χ2 (27, N = 10) = 83.49, considering **p < 0.05. Besides, analysis of the data revealed that deletion, with the frequency of 60.26%, was the topmost applied strategy in the rendition of the taboo expressions. Moreover, reduction of the dubbed run-time of the movies indicated that scene omission was another strategy to censor and prevent injection of harmful thoughts into the Islamic society of Iran. Thus, Iranian audiovisual translators mainly tend to localize, or domesticate, translation of taboo expressions while dubbing. Findings contribute to a proper translation of CSIs, especially taboos in AVT, mainly in the dubbing field.