AN ANALYSIS OF SUBTITLING STRATEGIES USED IN INDONESIAN BUSINESS YOUTUBE CONTENT BY CNA INSIDER

Abstract

Adopting a qualitative case study design, this research aims to analyze and discover the Indonesian-English subtitling strategy and identify which strategy appears most frequently in the CNA Insider YouTube content. This program is owned by Channel News Asia, a Singaporean news media outlet with broad coverage of news that highlights Asia. Limited to its business content in Indonesia, ten videos were selected purposively to ascertain the subtitling strategies applied. The Bahasa Indonesian utterances and English subtitles were transcribed manually with the help of a transcription tool for several contents. By comparing the script with the prepared subtitling strategies identification guide, the researcher identified, analyzed, and calculated the subtitling strategies used in each video. Using the subtitling strategies by Hariyanto (2005), the findings show only seven subtitling strategies applied: paraphrase (39.29%), transfer (25.97%), deletion (18.20%), expansion (13.56%), condensation (2.65%), imitation (0.25%), and transcription (0.08%).  Meanwhile, four strategies — decimation, dislocation, taming, and resignation — were not identified.  In addition, it is found that paraphrasing is the most used strategy because it is believed that this strategy allows a subtitler to not adhere strictly to the same syntactical rules of the source language, making the sentences restructured to fit the target language’s natural flow, so that the subtitles would be more readable and easier to understand.  However, this study has limitations, as it only covers a few aspects of the same topic; future researchers should explore different issues.