LANGUAGE COMPRESSION IN BAHASA INDONESIA SUBTITLES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES MOVIE

Abstract

Abstract

This  study  aims  at  describing  the  elements  of  language  that  are  compressed  through  language compression technique in Bahasa Indonesia subtitles of Sherlock Holmes movie, explaining the factors that trigger translator to compress the language and revealing the implication of language compression on meaning in Bahasa Indonesia subtitle of movie subtitles. This study applies a mixed method. It combined both a simple quantitative method and descriptive qualitative method. The former was used to present the frequency of language elements compressed in the target text, while the latter was used to describe and explain the factor and the implication of language compression on meaning. The data sources were the utterances in the movie and their compression results in Bahasa Indonesia. The results of the study show that. (1) language compression is found in 4 elements and occurs in 8 patterns involving Clause, Nominal Group, Verbal Group and Adverbial Group, (2) each compression is triggered by either one of the 4 factors; technical restriction, differences in language system, shift in the mode of the text from spoken to written text and the translator’s incompetence. (3) in subtitling, language  compression  is  not  only  implicating  the  form  of  the  text  but  also  the  meaning  of  the  text.  The implications on meaning are in the form of generalization, abstraction, lexical metaphor, grammatical metaphor, infusion and ellipsis. It is found that ellipsis is the most frequent technique used by the translator occuring 19 times or 58%, while the most implicated meaning is in the form of abstraction occurring 7 times or 21%

Keywords: language compression, subtitling