Rendering Strategies in Culture-Specific Items: Taboo Expressions in IRIB’s Dubbed Hollywood Movies

Abstract

Translators face a number of difficulties while translating. Not only translation of cultural elements is of utmost importance in translation studies, but also it is an arduous task for translators, especially in the case of interlingual translation. One of the biggest concerns of audiovisual translators is culture-specific items amongst which taboo expressions are included. This study aimed at investigating the applied strategies in the translation of taboo expressions, from English into Persian, in 5 Hollywood dubbed movies by IRIB; namely, <em>Family Business</em> (1989), <em>Lethal Weapon 3</em> (1992), <em>Sudden Death </em>(1995), <em>Welcome to Collinwood </em>(2002), and <em>Anacondas </em>(2004). Establishing this research, the original movies were compared with their dubbed Persian versions. Hence, the taboo expressions were extracted and compared with their Persian translations in the dubbed versions. Based on Venuti's (1995) strategies in translation studies (i.e., domestication and foreignization), the results were interpreted. Analysis of the relevant data indicated <em>χ</em>2 (12, <em>N</em> = 5) = 23.08, <em>p</em> = 0, considering **<em>p </em>˂ 0.05. Moreover, the “deletion" strategy, with the highest frequency (i.e., 55.97<em>%</em>), was the topmost used strategy in the rendition of the taboo expressions.