STRATEGIES USED IN INDONESIAN-ENGLISH TV SHOW SUBTITLING:A CASE STUDY

Abstract

The increased interest in audiovisual media leads to the significant need for audiovisual translation, one of which is subtitling. However, not many studies have been done on TV shows. Adopting qualitative case study design, this research aimed to identify and describe the Indonesian-English subtitling strategies of a TV show entitled Meet the Creators. The five episodes were selected randomly from fifteen episodes in this series. The Indonesian script was downloaded from Downsub and the English subtitle were transcribed from the video manually. By comparing the Indonesian and English script, the researcher identified six subtitling strategies, i.e., deletion (38.32%), transfer (35.31%), expansion (10.92%), condensation (8%), paraphrase (4.8%), and transcription (0.19%). In addition, combined strategies, transfer-imitation (1.51%) and deletion- imitation (0.47%) were also found. Five strategies, i.e., imitation, decimation, dislocation, taming, and resignation which were usually found in movie subtitling were not found in this research. Some mistranslation cases existed, adopting transfer (2.07%), deletion (0.47%), condensation (0.75%), expansion (0.65%), and paraphrase (0.28%) strategies. The highest frequency is in the use of transfer strategy. It implies that the subtitler should understand the sentence structure before applying transfer strategy for TV show subtitling. The researcher suggests future researchers to analyze the subtitling strategies on non-English to English subtitling to see if such findings are also found in non-English to English TV show subtitling. Another suggestion is to analyze the subtitling strategies on Indonesian-English movie subtitling to see if similar strategies are adopted in a different genre.