Dubbing Linguistic Taboos of Pulp Fiction into Persian: A Comparative Study of Translations by Students and Professionals

Translation training in audiovisual translation has received a lot of attention, but how students tackle the translation of linguistic taboos for dubbing or subtitling has been under-researched. To fill the gap, this descriptive study aims to examine how students’ strategies differ from those of professionals in terms of translating taboos. To do so, a group of fifteen BA students of English was requested to translate Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) into Persian. The translations made by the students were then compared with the professional translation available for the film. The results of the study indicated that the strategies taken by students in dealing with taboo language is so similar to those of professionals with the exception of decreasing taboo load. The students tended to delete most of linguistic taboos, which is also the commonly used strategy in the professional version of the film. The second frequent strategy employed by students was rendering taboo words into non-taboo words. By contrast, in the professional version, as the second frequent strategy and seemingly in order to retain the taboo load and effect, translators had substituted the taboo words with more culturally accepted taboo or offensive expressions. The results of this paper have some pedagogical implications for translator training classes.