Translation Techniques and Quality of Arabic–Indonesian Instagram Captions: A Case Study of @Natgeomagarab

Farrah Chaiya Mas; Adelia Natasya

doi:10.24256/jiis.v6i1.12158

Authors

Farrah Chaiya Mas Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia
Adelia Natasya Universitas Sebelas Maret , Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.24256/jiis.v6i1.12158

Keywords:

translation technique, translation quality, Instagram caption, Arabic-Indonesian translation, Molina & Albir

Abstract

Social media captions increasingly require translation to reach multilingual audiences, yet the quality of such translations is rarely examined empirically. This study investigates the sentence types, translation techniques, and translation quality of Arabic-Indonesian captions on the Instagram account @Natgeomagarab, the Arabic edition of National Geographic Magazine. Data comprised 52 Arabic captions and their Indonesian translations uploaded between 1-5 September 2023, analyzed using the eighteen translation techniques of Molina and Albir (2002) and the translation-quality assessment model of Nababan, Nuraeni, and Sumardiono (2012), covering accuracy, acceptability, and readability. Data were collected through observation, note-taking, and questionnaire techniques and analyzed descriptively-qualitatively following Miles and Huberman's interactive model and Spradley's domain analysis. Results show that nominal sentences (jumlah ismiyah) occurred in 33 captions (63.5%) and verbal sentences (jumlah fi’liyah) in 19 captions (36.5%), distributed across four themes: flora and fauna, tourism, astronomy, and advertisement. Ten of the eighteen possible techniques were applied across 550 instances, dominated by established equivalent (69.0%), adaptation (12.2%), and reduction (10.2%). The overall weighted translation-quality score across the three aspects was 2.06, placing the translations in the moderate category rather than fully accurate, acceptable, and readable. The findings suggest that heavy reliance on established equivalent and reduction techniques, while efficient for concise captions, does not automatically guarantee translation quality, indicating the need for more context-sensitive strategies when translating culturally embedded Arabic captions for an Indonesian audience.

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