VERBAL HUMOR IN DAVID SILVERMAN’S THE SIMPSONS MOVIE AND ITS BAHASA INDONESIA SUBTITLE

Abstract

This research intends to analyze how verbal humor in The Simpsons Movie is translated into Bahasa Indonesia subtitle. The objectives of this research is to classify the kinds of verbal humor found in The Simpsons Movie, to describe the subtitling strategies used in translating the verbal humor into Bahasa Indonesia subtitle and to find out the level of acceptability of verbal humor translation.
This research is categorized into a descriptive qualitative research since it describes translation phenomena in The Simpsons Movie. The data of this research are in the form of word units, phrase units, and sentence units that contained verbal humors. The sources of the data are in the form of dialogue or utterances expressed by the characters in the movie and its Bahasa Indonesia subtitle taken from the original DVD of The Simpsons Movie produced by Gracie Films for 20th Century Fox that was released in 2007.The main instrument of this research is the researcher herself and the supporting instrument is the data sheet. The data is categorized based on some theories. The first is verbal humor theory proposed by Spanakaki (2007). The second theory is subtitling strategies proposed by Gottlieb (1992) and the last is the level of acceptability in assessing translation proposed by Nababan (2012). To achieve trustworthiness, the data sheets were checked repeatedly by the researcher and discussed with the triangulators.
The results of this research show three important findings. The first is there are three types of verbal humor that appear in The Simpsons Movie which are wordplay, allusion and verbal irony. Among them, allusion has the highest number of occurrence. This happens because in the original series of The Simpsons the writer employs lots of cultural references in satirical ways that becomes the characteristic of The Simpsons humor. Therefore, it is expected that lots of allusion also appear in the movie version. The second is that the most used strategy in translating the verbal humor is imitation because it is the most proper way to translate allusion. The last is that most of the data are classified into acceptable translation which means that the translator is able to render the meaning well.

Keyword : Subtitle, Verbal Humor, Subtitling Strategies, Level of Acceptability, The
Simpsons Movie