Translation Techniques of Humor-Nuanced Assertive Speech Acts in the Indonesian Subtitles of Nailed It! Germany

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify humorous assertive speech acts and describe the translation techniques used by translators in the Indonesian subtitles of the Netflix reality show Nailed It! Germany. This research is a descriptive qualitative study. The data source is the German subtitles and their Indonesian translations from several episodes of Nailed It! Germany. The data consist of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences that represent humorous assertive utterances. The theory used to identify assertive speech acts is Searle’s Speech Act Theory (1979), while the translation techniques are analyzed using the theory by Molina and Albir (2002). Additionally, the Script-Based Semantic Theory of Humor (Raskin and Attardo, 1994) is applied to analyze the humorous content. The results show that the translator applies various translation techniques such as modulation, adaptation, transposition, and reduction in transferring humor from the source to the target language. Modulation is the most frequently used technique. The resulting translations are generally natural and comprehensible to the audience, although there are some shifts in humorous meaning.