THE EFFECT OF TRANSLATOR' GENDER ON THE CENSORSHIP OF TABOOS IN IRANIAN CONTEXT

Abstract

This research attempted to conduct an empirical study to investigate the differences in the way male and female translators use censorship to deal with the translation of taboo expressions, and also to find the correlation between genders' habitus and the censorship of taboo words. To this end, 60 Iranian undergraduate students in the field of "English Translation" were selected as the participants of this study. An English proficiency test was given to them to ensure they were all intermediate and upper. A sexually-loaded text with a full-frontal description of a woman's body and a text full of swear words were extracted from two different books and given to the participants to translate. To examine different censorship strategies, Brownlie’s category was adopted as the framework of the research. Analysis of the data revealed a significant positive relationship between translators' gender, their habitus, and the degree of censorship they used. Based on the findings of this study, due to the robust habitus in the mind of female translators, they tried to use censorship more than the male participants. Males felt more freedom in choosing proper equivalences and sometimes intensified the vulgarity of taboos by applying dysphemism in some cases. This paper also explains the reason for the robust habitus and the higher degree of censorship in female translators' work.