ABSTRACT
This is a descriptive qualitative research which focuses on analyzing translation techniques and quality of international joke and national-culture-and-institutions joke found in a movie entitled Date Night. It aims at (1) explicating international joke and national-culture-and-institutions joke, (2) finding out the translation techniques applied by the translator to translate international joke and national-culture-and-institutions joke, and (3) explaining how the techniques affect the translation quality of international joke and national-culture-and-institutions joke, in terms of accuracy and acceptability.
This research employs purposive sampling technique. Date Night is chosen as the source of data with international jokes and national-culture-and-institutions jokes taken as the data. The total data are 79 data which consist of 58 international jokes and 21 national-culture-and-institutions jokes. The other data are in the forms of information taken from the result of questionnaire given to the three raters and in-depth interview with them.
The analysis of translation techniques shows that there are eight techniques used by the translator to translate international jokes and national-culture-and-institutions jokes, namely transfer, paraphrase, imitation, transcription, expansion, deletion, condensation, and decimation. Those techniques are applied as single techniques or combination of two to six techniques. There are 13 (16.46%) data translated using single techniques and 66 (83.54%) data translated using multiple techniques.
The findings of the research in terms of translation quality show that 47 (59.49%) data of international joke are accurate, 11 (13.93%) data of international joke are less accurate, 14 (17.72%) data of national-culture-and-institutions joke are accurate, and seven (8.86%) data of national-culture-and-institutions joke are less accurate. The analysis on the acceptability reveals that 47 (59.49%) data of international joke are considered acceptable, 11 (13.93%) data of international joke are considered less acceptable, 16 (20.25%) data of national-culture-and-institutions joke are categorized into acceptable, and five (6.33%) data of national-culture-and-institutions joke are categorized into less acceptable.
The technique which produces the largest number of accurate translation is transfer, as many as 61 (77.22%) data. Meanwhile, decimation produces the largest number of less accurate translation, as many as 11 (13.93%) data. Transfer is also the most dominant technique which results in acceptable translation, as many as 62 (78.48%) data. Meanwhile, less acceptable translation results from the use of uncommon terminologies, inappropriate dictions, unnatural expressions, and incomplete punctuation mark used by the translator.
From the result, the translator has successfully translated most of the jokes. However, some jokes are less accurately or less acceptably translated because the translator uses wrong techniques or uses incomplete punctuation mark, inappropriate dictions, unnatural expressions, or uncommon terminologies.
Keywords: joke translation, humor translation, types of joke, translation quality,
translation technique