The advent of new platforms of audiovisual (AV) material distribution across cultures and the rise in the production of AV material have resulted in the need for more audiovisual translation. The need for fast interlingual access to foreign AV content as well as the emergence of new technological tools have subsequently led to AV translation by fans. In some more conservative cultures AV translation by fans especially has been growing much faster in the recently because of the limited or late access to foreign AV material. In spite of the exponential growth of such fan-produced AV translation, academic research has largely overlooked such phenomenon especially in smaller cultures and languages. Amateur AV translation in the form of fansubbing and fandubbing are both extensively under-researched in Iranian context and as an attempt to address this gap, the study aims at shedding some light on the fansubbing practice in Iran. Considering the divergent and anonymous nature of (Iranian) fansubbing, a stark contrast between the official and fan-produced rendition of AV material seems to be taboo language as a form of defying socio-cultural and ideological norms of such a conservative society. To explore this concept, the study aims to investigate how Iranian fansubbers deal with taboo and offensive language and what strategies they employ for taboo rendition into Persian. For that matter, a selection of ten American movies were used as the corpus of the study, and the corresponding Persian subtitle files were obtained from fansubbing websites. The findings consistently reveal that fansubbers have a general tendency to follow the norms of the source language and by and large keep original taboo language. By not toning down the taboo language, fansubbers deviate from the current official translation norms in Iran. Having presented the results using descriptive statistics, the paper further discusses the implication of keeping taboo language in written from for the Iranian society and recommends further research.

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