When conveying opinions or ideas, some people prefer to be indirect to either sound less impolite or increase the force of the message communicated. This phenomenon occurs in media such as novel as well. When the work is going to be translated, then the translation should take many considerations to be able to convey the indirectness and avoid misunderstanding in the target language. The problems examined in this research are as follow: (1) What types of indirect expressive speech acts are found in the source text and how are the indirectness translated in the target text? and (2) What is the level of accuracy and acceptability of the indirect expressive speech acts in the translation?

This study aims to find all indirect expressive speech acts in the It End With Us novel, classify them, and examine if the data underwent a shift in the translation as well as assessing the quality of the translation. The classification of the data is based on Norrick’s (1978) theory which categorizes expressive speech acts into nine: boasting, apologizing, deploring, thanking, welcoming, forgiving, condoling, lamenting, and congratulating. The next step was to evaluate if the data maintain their indirectness in the translation using Grice’s (1975) theory of maxims and Yule’s (1996) theory of connection between the structure and the function of a sentence. This research is a descriptive qualitative research since it analyzed the data in the form of words. The data are all indirect expressive speech acts identified gathered from the novel. Purposive sampling technique is used to ensure that the data extracted from the document are relevant with the purpose of the study. The data were later analyzed using content analysis method and were verified in Focus Group Discussion.

Based on the findings of this research, this novel contained a total of 32 indirect expressive speech acts with the following classification: boasting (10), deploring (8), complimenting (5), lamenting (5), forgiving (1), condoling (1), thanking (1), and apologizing (1). No data underwent a shift in indirectness. The difficulty of translating indirect expressive speech acts is affected by several factors such as the cultural disparity between the source language and the target language, the difficulty in finding the equivalent words in the target language, and the minimum understanding on the context of the work. In addition, the score for accuracy and acceptability is 2.81 and 2.53 respectively, while the final score of the Translation Quality Assessment is 2.67, indicating that despite the translation being imperfect and there is a room for improvement, the translator has overall successfully translated the indirect expressive speech acts into the target language.