Ideological Manipulation: A Study of the Movies Dubbed from English into Persian in the Post-Revolution Era

Any translated content, especially audiovisual translation, is often manipulated by the dominant ideology of the target society. The present study adopts a descriptive quantitative method to examine the ideological aspects of these manipulations in the dubbed movies broadcasted from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) in three decades after the Islamic Revolution in Iran. In this study, the text-internal and text-external manipulations were examined in nine historical and adventure movies in the periods of 1997-2005, 2005-2013, and 2013-2018. It was also attempted to identify the reasons behind these manipulations in terms of the governments’ policies and dominant values. Since audiovisual translation involves nonverbal elements such as image, sound, and music distinguishing it from written texts, the researchers attempted to adapt Dukāte’s model of manipulation according to the specific features of audiovisual translation. To this end, each manipulation classification was divided into two subcategories of verbally-induced and nonverbally-induced manipulations. After a comprehensive analysis of the movies along with their dubbed versions, five manipulation strategies, including addition, deletion, substitution, attenuation, and accentuation were identified. The results showed that in the period of 2005-2013, the volume of the manipulations in the conservative government outweighs that of the reformist government. The dominant strategy used in the conservative government was substitution and deletion while it was attenuation in the reformist government. Furthermore, nonverbally-induced manipulations were significantly more than verbally-induced ones in the dubbed movies.