MALAY SUBTITLES OF SEXUAL REFERENCES AND PROFANE LANGUAGE OF ENGLISH FILMS

Abstract

Subtitling English films in Malaysia, especially English sexual references and profane language into Malay Subtitles, presents the subtitle with specific constraints and challenges. These are due to the taboo nature of the source language texts which are deemed inappropriate to the Malay society. This article aimed to investigate the issues involved and the procedures the subtitler adopts in dealing with such translation challenges. Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) and Koponen’s (2010) model were utilised to examine the accuracy of the Malay subtitle for its corresponding English dialogue by comparing the semantic components in the source text-target text pairs of selected English language films aired on Malaysian Pay TV, Astro. The findings revealed that most of the sexual references and profane language was translated via “equivalence” procedure, while “omission” and “mistranslation” were the common errors made in the translations.