Mapping a Translation Field:
A Statistical Analysis of English Translations of Iranian Women's Fiction (1989–2025)
Abstract
For more than thirty years, Anglophone readers have encountered Iranian women's fiction through translation; yet no research has mapped this literature as a structural field. This gap is significant because it determines whether Iranian women's voices gain international recognition, depending on who chooses, publishes, and presents these works to English readers. This study examines how publisher type, author's exile status, and peritextual attribution shape the field's positions and position-takings, drawing on Bourdieu's sociology of cultural production and Batchelor's theory of paratext as a negotiated threshold. It uses non-parametric inferential tests, cross-tabulation, and descriptive statistics to analyse three linked bibliographic datasets. According to the data, only 7 of 56 books were published by university presses, and publisher type does not predict peritext quantity, author's exile status, or print status in Iran. Rather, the source field proves crucial, since 97.9% of self-exiled authors' works are either out of print or prohibited in Iran. Exile status is associated with lower Persian award receipts at the book level but not at the author level and prestige in Persian and English functions independently of one another. In the target field, agency is allocated through peritext rather than credentials: translators currently lead in the most recent phase (48.2%, 2016-2025), while publishers control 44.6% of peritextual elements and 91.4% of biographies. The study concludes that peripheral literatures under state control are gatekept primarily in the source field rather than the Anglophone target field.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Mina Zandrahimi, Farzaneh Farahzad
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Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).
