Taboos in IRIB’s Dubbed Hollywood Movies: A Look at Translation of Culture-Bound Elements

Different cultures express their idiosyncrasies in a culture-bound way. Cultural aspects—if not the only—are among the most arduous tasks in rendition of audiovisual materials from the SL into the TL. This study aimed at investigating the applied strategies in rendering taboos, from English to Persian, in 5 dubbed Hollywood movies by IRIB, namely Sudden Death (1995), Family Business (1989), Welcome to Collinwood (2002), Deadly Impact (2009), and Law Abiding Citizen (2009). Original movies were compared with their dubbed versions. Accordingly, the taboo expressions were extracted and compared with the Persian translations in the dubbed movies. Adapting to Venuti’s (1995) strategies in translation studies (i.e., domestication and foreignization), the results were interpreted through the SPSS software. Analysis of the chi-square indicated that the p-value was not significant at χ 2 (16,N= 5) = 39.17, p = 0, considering p ˂ 0.05. Besides, analysis of the data indicated that deletion, with the highest frequency (53.03%), was the topmost used strategy in the rendition of the taboo expressions. Therefore, Iranian audiovisual translators mainly tend to localize or domesticate the translation of taboo expressions while dubbing. This study will contribute to the proper translation of taboos in audiovisual translation, especially the dubbing field.

Keywords:

Culture-Bound Elements , Audiovisual Materials , SL , TL , Taboo , Domestication , Foreignization , Audiovisual Translation