Taboo Rendition in Persian Dubbed Version of Detective Movies:

A Case Study of Wasps' Nest (Agatha Christie's Poirot Episode)

Abstract

The present research is going to investigate the strategies adopted by Persian translators in case of taboo translation due to the role of cultural norms and translators’ hiring institutions policies. In this study, one translation of the Persian dubbing of an English series entitled “Hercule Poirot”—the episode named ‘wasps’ nest’—was analyzed. The English episode along with its Persian dubbed version formed the corpus of the study and the Persian dubbing was done by Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB). The theoretical frame work was based on the classification of taboo by Sharifi and Darchinian (2009) and the strategies proposed by Khoshsaligheh et al. (2014) for translating taboo. The present research aimed to find answers to these questions: 1) Regarding taboos, which strategies were utilized in Persian dubbed version of the detective episode? 2) Is it possible that the audience of the dubbed version in target language get the same impact (considering plot story, suspense and detective clues to solve puzzles) as an English viewer get? And 3) Do Persian translators tend to observe the norms of the source or of the target language in the rendition of taboos? The findings of the research illustrated that upon encountering cultural clashes between the source and target works, the translator of the movie preferred to substitute the inappropriate elements with more acceptable ones and to omit taboo scenes or the taboo conversation totally. Some censorship strategies affected the story in the dubbed version and it seems that the plot story changed in some parts. The suspense was lost in the Persian version in some scenes and one can find distortion of many conversations and of the end of the episode.