Translation Strategies of Slang Expression in the Indonesian Subtitle of Anyone but You: A Mona Baker’s Perspective

Abstract

Using Baker’s (2018) framework of lexical non-equivalence as the analytical basis, this article explores how informal English utterances in Anyone But You are rendered for Indonesian viewers through Netflix’s official caption track. Earlier scholarship has discussed both subtitling and informal language; however, comparatively little attention has been directed toward the ability of Baker’s framework to account for context-dependent meanings and interpersonal functions carried by slang in recent English-language cinema. Accordingly, the analysis determines which rendering procedures occur in the film and establishes the option that appears most prominently. A qualitative descriptive design was adopted. The corpus comprised 115 slang items extracted from the English dialogue and matched with their Indonesian renderings in the official Netflix release. Data compilation involved multiple screenings of the movie, alignment between spoken utterances and captioned versions, selection of slang according to relevant linguistic indicators, and subsequent categorization under Baker’s (2018) framework. Only four of the eight available procedures occurred in the corpus. Culture-oriented adaptation ranked first with 40 cases (34.8%). Reformulation through lexically distant wording occupied the second position with 39 cases (33.9%). Neutralized or less emotive rendering accounted for 19 instances (16.5%), whereas reformulation through semantically connected wording occurred in 17 cases (14.8%). None of the remaining procedures appeared in the dataset. The distribution suggests that the subtitler generally favored contextual adjustment and reformulation in order to retain the interpersonal force of informal language while making the captions idiomatic, accessible, and culturally familiar to viewers in Indonesia. By illustrating how Baker’s framework can be operationalized in the examination of present-day cinematic slang, this article broadens scholarship on audiovisual language transfer and offers a foundation for subsequent work on subtitling practices.