Norms of Translating Taboo Words and Concepts from English into Persian after the Islamic Revolution in Iran

The research attempted to discover the norms of translating taboo words and concepts after the Islamic Revolution in Iran using Toury’s (1995) framework for classification of norms. The corpus of the study composed of Coelho’s novels between 1990 and 2005 and their Persian translations which were prepared and analyzed manually to discover the norms. During both the selection of novels for translation and the process of translating by translator norms were at work. It was also discovered that the translators of the novels complied with the target language norms, i.e. the translators had attempted to produce acceptable translations. Regarding preliminary norms, the research suggested that the translation policy was based on popularity of the author that could guarantee the salability of translations. The frequency of the norms suggested that euphemism with 37.87 percent was the dominant norm in translating taboo words and concepts. The frequency of the norms in each of the books, as well as their frequency in the entire corpus was measured and presented in tables and discussed. Finally, it was found out that the dominant ideology in Iran was a determining factor in the process of decision making by the translators.