The current study is an attempt to investigate the cases of censorship in dubbed movies in Iran and to establish the norms based on which the whole system operates to apply this strategy in any mode of translation. It seeks to answer these questions:
1. What are the most common strategies when applying censorship in dubbed movies in Iranian TV? Are they rule-governed? How?
2. What are those determining factors in the application of censorship? Are they ideological ones?
3. Does censorship cause any significant changes in the whole meaning of the text of the film? If yes, how much?
To which the following answers are provided:
1. The most common manifestations of censorship include: deletion, adjustment and alteration in word choice or mistranslation, all of which are rule-governed according to the norms governing the target culture.
2. Factors contributing to the application of this strategy are mostly related to sexual behaviours which are considered as both religious and cultural. Thus all are ideological changes which are applied according to the norms governing the target country and culture.
3. The influence of this strategy in the product of the work of translation may result in the improvement or destruction of the final result. It is observed that when there’s a change, it is due to the socio-cultural norms of the target society.
To analyse the data collected, translation shifts are utilised since it seemed to the researcher that censorship is a kind of shift in ideology. Another point to be mentioned is that censorship is observed to function in two distinctive forms: censorship of the scenes and censorship of the words uttered.
The theoretical framework is mainly descriptive building on the theory of DTS proposed by Holmes and later developed by Toury. Since the research is closely related to audiovisual translation, culture and norms, the researcher has tried to follow the models and framework presented by Even-Zohar on “Polysystem Theory” and Gideon Toury on “Cultural Norms”. The movies under the study named “Godfather” have already been shown on TV in Iran. The purpose was to explore some strategies that contribute to certain shared methods of censorship in dubbed movies in Iran. Therefore, the scope of research is delimited to merely omission, euphemism and alteration in words and scenes.

Mina QAVAMI-ADEL has an MA in Translation Studies from Allame Tabataba'i University, Teheran (Iran) entitled “A Study of Dubbed Gender-Sensitive Movies within CDA Framework), and a BA in English Translation from Arak University. She has worked as a translator at the Translation Studies Center (Allame Tabataba’i University), translating English-Persian cultural, psychological and medical texts and teaching L2 language learners of English. Her publications include Empowerment And Innovation (forthcoming English-Persian translation published by NAJA publications) and Community Oriented Policing (forthcoming English-Persian translation published by NAJA publications). She has been an invited lecturer at the IT and Translation conference at Allame Tabataba’i University (Tehran, Iran, 2007). Her research interests are audiovisual translation, descriptive translation studies (including critical discourse analysis in translation), ideology in translation, gender studies and gender in translation.