Lexical Non-Equivalence and Translation Strategies in Subtitles of “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies”

บทคัดย่อ

The objectives of this study were: 1) To investigate the types of lexical non-equivalent problems found in the English subtitles of the Thai movie “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies”. 2) To examine translation strategies employed in English subtitles of the Thai movie “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies”. 3) To explain the possible reasons for the use of translation strategies in English subtitles of the Thai movie “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies”. This study adopted a mixed-methods approach. A total of 262 Thai–English subtitle pairs containing lexical non-equivalence were selected from 1,403 subtitle lines in the film “How to Make Millions Before Grandma Dies” (Netflix). Baker’s (2018) conceptual categories of lexical non-equivalents were used to analyze the non-equivalents. The translation strategy taxonomy proposed by Baker (2018), Newmark (1988), and Larson (1998) was applied to explain translation strategies used in subtitle translation. The content analysis was employed to explore the reasons for the use of translation strategies. The findings of this study were: 1) The top three lexical non-equivalence were the source language lacks of details with 44 times, (16.79%), followed by the context of source language is understandable with 35 times (13.35%), and differences in physical or interpersonal perspective with 34 times (13%), respectively. 2) Translation by omission (52 times, 19.85%) was the most commonly used translation strategy, followed by translation by paraphrase using an unrelated word (47 times, 17.94%), and translation by addition (42 times, 16.03%), respectively. 3) Four reasons for translation strategy use to cope with translation problems at the word level were semantic problems, lexical problems, cultural problems, and form-related problems. The results of this study could be a guideline for translators to employ practical strategies in movie subtitle translation. Pedagogical implications are also discussed to shed light on the teaching and learning of translation.