Exploring Chinese Idiomatic Expressions in Malay Subtitles

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Translation Strategies and Difficulties in Translating English Idiomatic Expressions

Translation plays an important role in transferring meaning across languages, particularly when translating idiomatic expressions whose meanings cannot be interpreted literally. This study aimed to identify the translation strategies employed by sixth-semester students in translating English idiomatic expressions into Indonesian and to investigate the translation difficulties they encountered. The study employed a descriptive quantitative design involving 24 sixth-semester students of the English Department at UIN Fatmawati Sukarno Bengkulu. The research instrument was a translation test consisting of 15 idiomatic expressions selected from Barack Obama's speech Ignorance is Not a Virtue. The students' translations were analyzed using Baker's (1992) translation strategies, while translation difficulties were classified based on Baker (1992) and Larson (1998). The findings revealed that Translation by Paraphrase was the dominant strategy, accounting for 345 translations (95.83%), followed by Using an Idiom of Similar Meaning but Dissimilar Form with 15 translations (4.17%). No data were categorized as Using an Idiom of Similar Meaning and Form or Translation by Omission. Regarding translation difficulties, Contextual Difficulty was the most dominant category with 161 cases (73.85%), followed by Linguistic Difficulty with 33 cases (15.14%) and Cultural Difficulty with 24 cases (11.01%). The findings indicate that students experienced greater difficulty in interpreting the intended meanings of idiomatic expressions within their communicative contexts than in understanding linguistic or cultural aspects. Furthermore, 218 translations (60.55%) were classified as less accurate and inaccurate, indicating that contextual interpretation substantially influenced translation quality. The study suggests that translation instruction should emphasize contextual interpretation alongside linguistic and cultural competence to improve students' ability to translate idiomatic expressions accurately

Seisa O Shimesu Honyaku O Shiyagatte : The Influence of Character Gender on the Translation of Vulgarity into Japanese

This study examines how gender influences Japanese translations of vulgarity across the first season of the online dramas The Boys and Russian Doll . Through analyzing if, where, and how English vulgarities spoken by male and female characters are localized into Japanese across the programs’ dubbing and subtitling, the current study aims to address a lack of attention to both issues of gender and Asian languages in studies of vulgarity translation to date. The study also contains a detailed methodology regarding issues in attempting to analyze vulgarity translation between English and Japanese, noting problems that arose in adopting study designs used to study vulgarity translation between European languages and providing potential solutions. Ultimately, the analysis shows that while non-translation of vulgarity is quite common in general in the Japanese context, women's swearing is translated less than men's and translations occur via distinct sets of linguistic forms, showing that translators are approaching vulgarities differently depending on speaker gender. That said, the study also notes higher amounts of vulgarity use by women than many other studies of Japanese media to date, showing potential changes in attitudes towards gendered language practices.

Translation strategies in the Indonesian subtitles of the Women Talking movie: A study based on Gottlieb’s translation theory

Audio-visual translation (AVT) is an essential part of making films accessible across languages and cultures. However, there are few research on subtitling procedures in films with social and ideological complexity. This study aims at analyzing the types of translation strategies employed in the Indonesian subtitles of “Women Talking” (2022) based on Gottlieb’s classification of translation strategies (1992) as well as investigating the most frequently used translation strategies used in the Indonesian subtitles of the movie. Using a descriptive qualitative approach, a total of 300 of 1,318 subtitle units were purposively selected and analyzed using documentation and qualitative content analysis. The findings showed that 8 out of 10 Gottlieb’s translation strategies were identified that included Transfer, Paraphrase, Condensation, Imitation, Expansion, Deletion, Decimation, and Resignation strategies, while Transcription and Dislocation were absent. Transfer strategy is the most frequently used strategy with 160 occurrences (53.33%), followed by Paraphrase (50 occurrences, 16.67%), Condensation (30 occurrences, 10.00%), Imitation (17 occurences, 5.67%), Expansion (15 occurences, 5.00%), Deletion (15 occurences, 5.00%), Decimation (12 occurences, 4.00%), and Resignation (1 occurence, 0.33%). The prevalent use of Transfer strategy suggests the translator’s preference for retaining the original content via literal translation, but Paraphrase and Condensation were used to address linguistic and technical limits of subtitling. The results indicate that the translation of Indonesian subtitles of Women Talking put semantic correctness at the top of the priority list while still keeping the readability for Indonesian viewers.

DOMINANCE OF MODULATION AND REDUCTION TECHNIQUES IN THE ARABIC–INDONESIAN SUBTITLE TRANSLATION OF THE FILM NAGA (2023) ON THE NETFLIX PLATFORM

Translating Arabic film subtitles into Indonesian presents unique challenges, particularly in bridging linguistic and cultural gaps on global streaming platforms like Netflix. The film Naga (2023) serves as an intriguing subject due to its combination of Saudi Arabian religious-cultural discourse and the horror genre. This study aims to analyze the translation techniques employed in the Indonesian subtitles of the first 30 minutes of the film. This research employs a qualitative descriptive method using document analysis (observation and note-taking) on the subtitle data. The data were analyzed using the translation techniques framework proposed by Molina and Albir (2002). The analysis of 187 dialogue data revealed the application of six translation techniques: modulation, reduction, particularization, adaptation, borrowing, and transposition. Modulation was the most dominant technique (36.4%), followed by reduction (31.6%) and particularization (17.1%). The prominence of modulation and reduction indicates the translator's strong effort to adapt the characters' emotional expressions into the Indonesian cultural context, while simultaneously considering the spatial and temporal constraints (Characters Per Second) of the subtitle screen. These findings affirm that subtitle translation is not merely a linguistic transfer of meaning, but a cultural and contextual negotiation process to ensure the readability and acceptability for the target audience.

Preserving Satire Across Modalities: Subtitling Strategies and Rhetorical–Pragmatic Preservation in Arabic–Indonesian Audiovisual Translation

Satirical utterances in audiovisual texts convey criticism through implicit meanings, rhetorical contrasts, and contextual cues, making them vulnerable to shifts in cross-cultural subtitling. This exploratory case study examines how Arabic satirical implicatures are preserved, reformulated, or weakened in the official Indonesian subtitles of From the Ashes: The Pit. The data comprised 23 satirical utterances identified through exhaustive criterion-based sampling of the entire film. The Arabic dialogue was manually transcribed, verified by an Arabic-language specialist, aligned with scene timestamps, and compared with the Indonesian subtitles. Analysis combined Gottlieb’s subtitling strategies, Simpson’s model of satirical discourse, Zabalbeascoa’s functional approach, Relevance Theory, and audiovisual constraints. Four strategies were identified: transfer (11), paraphrase (9), condensation (2), and resignation (1). The corpus included irony (10), cynicism (7), and sarcasm (6). The findings suggest that satirical implicatures were preserved when the subtitle retained the target of criticism, evaluative stance, and sufficient verbal or audiovisual cues. Paraphrase and condensation could also maintain satire when formal changes preserved these functional elements, whereas resignation produced the clearest contextual ambiguity. These findings are limited to this single-film exploratory corpus.