Strategies of Subtitling the Word Fuck in The Wolf of Wall Street Movie

Abstract

To determine the appropriate strategy for the translation of the word fuck and its variants in audio visual translation is indeed problematic. On the one hand, the translator is required to maintain the beauty of the literary value as reflected in the dialogues, including the usage of offensive swear words; on the other hand, he is obliged to comply with the provisions stipulated in government regulation number 13 year 2014 concerning film censorship agency, especially paragraph 6 article 25 which forbids the usage of vulgar, offensive, racist words that have the potential to ignite public unrest. This research is intended to investigate the choice of translation strategy made by the translator. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative using data in the form of the word fuck and its variants with The Wolf of Wall Street movie as the data source. This study is also intended to compare the results of a similar study conducted by Hawel (2019) which is about the strategy of audiovisual translation from English to Arabic. The results showed that there are similarities in the frequency of the strategies used, namely omission and softening strategies, which reached 75% and 25% respectively in Hawel's research (2019), and omission and mollification strategies which reached 72.9% and 27.1% consecutively in this study. The word mollification in this research is similar to the word softening in Hawel's (2019).