Background of Study INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

A. Background of Study

Translation has grown rapidly. Nowadays, translation is not only used in books or other written texts but also used in film subtitle. This is known as Audio Visual Translation AVT. Translation is needed here to make the audience understand the message or the meaning of the speech which is said in foreign language. Film subtitle is needed by those whose mother tongue is not the language used in the movie, such as the Indonesian people who watch a movie that uses English. Not all Indonesian people can speak or understand English well. Therefore, most of the English movies are completed with subtitle in Bahasa Indonesia. To make a subtitle, a translator has to obey the rules of subtitle. The rules are related to duration and space. Duration in this case is related to the time, how long the subtitle appears. Meanwhile, space is related to the size of the fonts, the number of characters, and the lines that are allowed to appear at the bottom of the screen. Related to those two restrictions, space and duration, there is a special treatment for the subtitle in which not all the expressions are translated. This is totally different from translated novels, books, or other written texts that almost all sentences are translated to the target language. There are some examples of subtitle. One of the examples is taken from the Saving Private Ryan film that says “Well, you let me know of it”. It is translated in Bahasa Indonesia a s “ Kabari aku ”. It can be seen that the subtitle in Bahasa Indonesia are shorter than the English expression. It shows that the TT is more efficient in the number of letters. Besides, this also considers about the perusal of the subtitle by the viewers. If the English expression is translated completely, it will be ‘ Baiklah, kabari aku jika kau sudah mengetahuinya ’. The translated expression in Bahasa Indonesia is longer and the duration for the audience to read is longer too. Moreover, this will decrease the viewers’ readability. Subtitling, in a film, means an activity of translating the dialogue and showing the translation at the bottom of the screen. Matsumoto 2003 states that translation for subtitles for television program and film involves unique and interesting procedures that do not exist in other works of translation. Translating a subtitle is not only considering about the moving images, worrying the duration and space, counting numbers of letters, but also understanding the difference of the cultures. There are many films with Bahasa Indonesia subtitle, but Saving Private Ryan is chosen in this research. Saving Private Ryan is chosen because there are many aspects that people have to know. Those aspects are history, characteristics of the country, and faithfulness towards friends.

B. Research Focus