Abstract Linguistics, translation studies and literature have always been hand in hand. In translation of literary texts, a translator needs to be familiar with linguistic domains and its different areas. In the process of translation, the translator should also be familiar with the limitations of the target language as well. Although some changes will naturally happen when translating from a source text to a target language, it is also seen that the process moves to a bigger level of manipulating the translation. So, translation is not a neutral act of replacing a word by its target equivalent since every translator “is influenced by his own cultural values and his ideology, which cause him/her to ‘manipulate’ the source text by making some additions, omissions, adaptations, and so on”. The theoretical framework for this study is based on Lambert and van Gorp. The methodology of this article is also based on the four steps as Lambert and van Gorp suggest. The corpus of this study consists of selected novels in English by Milan Kundera, and their Persian translations. The results of the study show that the dominant type of manipulation strategy applied by the translator was deletion which is the most severe manipulation strategy among others. The subjects being manipulated in the examined corpus were cultural subjects including moral issues, ideological and cultural mismatches between the two languages.

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