Indonesia Conference Directory

Implicatures are a form of an indirect communication that serves many kinds of function in social engagement. In films, particularly, they serve as a device of narrative, characterization, and irony. For instance, in American TV Series House of Cards, implicatures are utilized to unfold the narrative plot and also to deliver irony rooted from the emotion of the characters. When the series are subtitled into Indonesian, some problems regarding the implicatures in the film emerge. Since some implicatures in the series are culturally bound, the translation is expected to accommodate the same force of message as in the original while being acceptable to the culture of target text. In addition to that, retaining the original does not guarantee that the viewers understand the implicatures since the culture of implicatures is different in both source text and target text. The choice other than maintaining the implicatures as implicatures in the subtitle is to explicate the implicatures into explicatures. This, too, comes with a consequence of nullifying the roles of the implicaturs in the film. Therefore, this research aims to study 1) whether the implicatures are explicated or preserved in the subtitle; 2) the impact of the explicitation of the implicatures in the subtitle towards the original function of implicatures in the film; and 3) the implication of the explicitation and preservation of the implicatures on the quality of the subtitle. The underlying theories adopted in answering those phenomena are theory of implicature, theory of subtitle, and the assessment of translation theory. The study is a qualitative adopting case study approach. The sampling of the study is purposive. The source of the data is the first episode of American TV Series House of Cards Season 1. The data are utterances of implicatures in the film. The result of the study presents 33 implicatures found in the film. They function to unfold narrative plots in the film and also to showcase the irony comments by the characters in the film. Almost all of the implicatures are translated by maintaining the implicature force in the subtitle. Only four implicatures are found to be explicated in the Indonesian subtitle. Both explicitation and preservation of the implicatures in the subtitle do not significantly affect the accuracy aspect but do much on the aspect of acceptability and therefore, readability. Generally, the subtitle of the implicatures does not alter the purpose of the original implicatures in the film but only a few, the explicated implicatures, lose the intended function in the translation.