Translation Under Constraint: Censorship in the Islamic Republic of Iran (sTUCk)

The indispensable status of translation and translators in Iran, the availability of multiple translations of the same works, and the strict censorship imposed by the government on translators make the Iranian situation a promising object of translational research, well beyond its areal provenance. The proposed research will try to describe the main characteristics of the particular field of literary translation in Iran by analyzing the dynamics between different role players competing with each other in this field. It will then try to explore the true nature of limitations and constraints that Iranian translators are exposed to and discover different strategies that they use in practice to deal with these limitations and constraints. To this end, an English novel and its multiple Persian translations will be carefully examined in the light of information obtained from interviews that will be conducted with the Iranian translators of the novel.