SOCIOLINGUISTIC SENSITIVITY OF ENGLISH MOVIE SUBTITLES A Comparison of Indonesian and Korean Subtitles

Abstract

Movies in English are widely distributed across the world by different means. One of them is by using DVDs. The DVDs mostly conceive subtitles in different languages so people with different language background can still enjoy the movies. This study is aimed at comparing the Korean and Indonesian subtitles for movies in English from sociolinguistic perspective. Korean is known as a language where politeness markers are overtly shown by grammatical markers. Indonesian, is a language without speech level but scale of formalities can be marked by some lexical items and morphosyntactic structures. This paper is an attempt to identify strategies used by the translators (or the subtitlers) to the two languages when they translated/subtitled movies in English. The result of this research suggests that translation strategies in the subtitle in Korean to some extent preserve the sociolinguistic sensitivity of the speakers, while the opposite happens to Indonesian. I argue that this is because the subtitle has already become a specific genre, therefore, people can tolerate sociolinguistic insensitivity within the subtitles and rely completely on.