Strategies of Censorship in Translating Children’s Stories from English into Persian

Abstract

Censorship is a form of manipulative rewriting of discourse by one agent or structure over another agent or structure, aiming at filtering the stream of information from one source to another. Censorship has an important role in the translation of Children’s literature. The present research aimed to find answers to two questions: 1) in what domain (moral, religious, political, and military) is censorship mostly applied in translation of children’s stories? 2) Which censorship strategies were utilized more in children stories? To this end, a corpus comprising 25 stories for children plus their Persian translations was complied. Next the corpus was studied utilizing Toury's norms and Dukate’s categorization. Then all the 25 books and their Persian translations were compared and contrasted. The results indicated that, religious censorship in pictures and text chunks of children's stories had the highest frequency. It seems that sensitivity of censorship strategies mostly concentrates on the religious issues.