TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES AND PRAGMATIC EQUIVALENCE IN INDONESIAN TRANSLATION OF HUMOROUS UTTERENCES IN THE WALT DISNEY’S DONALD DUCK COMICS

Abstract

This paper presents a study of English-Indonesian translation of the humorous utterances in Walt Disney’s Donald Duck comics. Twenty one Indonesian translated comics of the 2008 issues and their original English versions were used as the source of data. A total of 480 humorous English utterances were identified and verified by 4 native English speakers. These 480 English utterances and their translations were used as the data. Analyses of the collected data were then made to see the translation techniques used by the translator in translating the humorous utterances and to see the resulted pragmatic equivalence viewed from the equivalence of pragmatic force between the source text (ST) and target text (TT), involving implicture analysis of the utterances. The findings of the research reveal that 647 uses of translation techniques are made to translate the 480 utterances, as more than one techniques are used in some of the utterances. Seventeen out of 18 translation techniques proposed by Molina & Albir (2002) are chosen by the translator. It is also found out that the translator’s choice of translation techniques has resulted in 96.87% of the translated humorous utterances being equivalent in their pragmatic force, compared to the original English utterances. The use of such translation techniques as generalization, established equivalent, linguistic compression, amplification, literal translation, compensation, linguistic amplification, variation, particularization, borrowing, transposition, description, and calque has resulted in equivalent pragmatic force between ST and TT. Only minor portion (3.13%) of the translated text is not equivalent in its pragmatic force, and this is caused by the use of amplification, discursive creation, reduction, adaptation, and modulation techniques.  The high rate of pragmatic equivalence shows the translator’s success in translating the text.

Key words: implicature, pragmatic force, pragmatic equivalence, translation technique