Equivalence in the Translation French-English in the Film Subtitles “Les Intouchables”

Abstract

Translation as a concept of transposing the context and meaning to another language, in order to reach the same level of equivalence. This research attempts to classify the categories of equivalence found in the subtitle translation of the film Les Intouchables and to analyse the dominant strategies used by the translator to achieve equivalence in subtitle translation. The sample of this study is the English subtitles of the film Les Intouchables. The study uses Nida’s (1969) approach on equivalence and Catford (1964) to analyse the strategies to achieve the equivalence in the translation.  Overall, this research collected and recorded 251 data that utilized the three strategies to achieve equivalence, which are addition strategy, deletion strategy and category shifts. The addition strategy is the most used, which amounts to 136 data or 54.18% of the overall. For addition strategy, addition of statement is mostly used, accounting to 32.25 % of overall addition strategy, followed by addition of interrogative statement (20.59%) and imperative statement (12.5%). It was found that the addition strategy is very useful in further elaborating the meaning of the subtitles to ensure the context of the dialogue is comprehensible to the audience. Meanwhile, the translator opted for deletion strategy to avoid redundancy, but the impact of the original dialogue is lost. As for the category shift, it is used to avoid miscomprehension among the audience due to cultural difference between the English and French language. It is hoped that future research would explore the used of strategies and equivalence on other languages, to see the similarities and the differences in the translation of other languages.