Domestication in Translated Literature: A Strategy of Resistance to Foreign Cultural Patterns

Domestication, as noted by Venuti, is the dominant translation strategy in powerful cultures such as the Anglo-American culture. This strategy has political, cultural and economic motivations in such dominant cultures and when applied, the cultural products of smaller countries are framed according to the cultural standards of the target culture; consequently, texts are manipulated in such a way that they seem ‘transparent’ and ‘familiar’. The present paper intends to introduce other motivations for the phenomenon called ‘domestication’. The purpose is to find other reasons behind domestication in the translated literature published under a ‘Fundamentalist’ administration in power in contemporary Iran. To achieve this purpose, the manipulations imposed by the administration on the published translations are used to study and cast light on a kind of state-imposed domestication and its motivations. Thus, the source and target texts of four American novels translated under this administration were compared and the mismatches in the translated texts were analyzed. The results showed that the world pictured in the Persian versions had been rendered closer to the social and cultural conditions in Iran, hence a kind of domestication. Therefore, it can be claimed that: 1) domestication is not confined to powerful cultures such as the Anglo-American culture; the Iranian culture, too, resorts to this translation strategy, but in a different manner, i.e. in order to maintain its sociopolitical stability and prevent the infiltration of foreign cultures. 2) domestication can become the dominant translation strategy under the influence of institutions of power and as a result of the policies adopted by those institutions.