Equivalence in French-English Subtitles’ Translation of La Vie Scolaire

Abstract

Translating movie subtitles can be challenging, especially in finding the equivalence between French and English as both languages have their own structure and writing style. However, equivalence translation can still be achieved by employing the Addition, Deletion and Category Shift strategies. This study helps translators to tackle the problems in subtitling to create a ‘natural’ translation despite the distinction between source language (SL) and target language (TL). Generally, the aim of this study is to explore the dominant strategy used to achieve equivalence in subtitle translation based on the movie La Vie Scolaire. The qualitative method is utilized by transcribing the movie subtitles and comparing the subtitle transcription of the SL (French) and the TL (English). The subtitles that were translated using the Addition, Deletion, and Category shifts strategy to achieve equivalence translation. The subtitles are, then, classified according to the respective categories that it belongs to. Findings indicate the most dominant strategy used by the translator to achieve equivalence is the Addition strategy that occupies 51% meanwhile the second and third most used strategy is Deletion and category shifts that occupies 31.3% and 17.7% respectively. Since there is less study that uses French movie as sample data, it is hoped that more research will be conducted related to subtitling strategy analysis by employing popular French films.