Milad Mehdizadkhani

Trainee versus Professional Translators in Rendition of Taboo Language in English to Persian Audiovisual Translation

Translator education is a field of ever-growing importance in AVT research. However, far too little attention has been paid to research on how to render taboo and offensive language in the context of AVT education. The present paper, therefore, strived to fill the niche by  asking 25 Iranian B.A students, studying English Translation at the University of Zanjan, to firstly watch Pulp Fiction, a 1994 American film directed by Quentin Tarantino and then translate the transcription of the film as their final assignment for the two-credit course entitled as Film Translation. Thanks to the availability of the official translation of the film, the translational strategies toward taboo language used by the students and professional translators were compared. The analysis of taboo language was based on the empirical and locally relevant framework presented in the literature as well as the guidelines proposed by the Iranian Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in which the notion of inappropriateness has been defined in terms of Persian conventions and traditions. The results revealed the students like the professional translators followed the norms of the target language by deleting the taboo items. Nevertheless, the second most frequent toning down strategy, used by the students,  was substituting the taboo item in the original with something unrelated in the target text whereas the professional translators’ one was mitigating the potentially offensive expression with the suggested equivalents. The findings were recommended to be used in the context of translation education – especially in the conservative societies such as Iran – to raise the trainee translators’ awareness of the various strategies at their disposal when tasked with the translation of taboo language.

Milad Mehdizadkhani is a PhD student in English Applied Linguistics at the University of Szeged, Hungary. He holds a BA and an MA in English Translation from the University of Zanjan and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Iran, respectively. During his Master’s studies, he was an exchange student at the University of Warsaw, Poland. He has recently presented papers in several international conferences and published articles in two leading journals, Journal of Academic Ethics and Journal of Language and Intercultural Communication. His research interests include audiovisual translation and translator education.