Misinterpretation of Brainrot Humor by Automated Translation in TikTok Influencer Nathasya’s Content

Abstract

The expansion of social media has led to the emergence of new types of digital humour, including the niche internet humour genre known as “brainrot” humour, characterised by bizarre, viral catchphrases, memes, and references to context. Machine translation systems struggle with "brainrot" humour because it's so deeply embedded in internet culture and shared digital experiences. This research intends to analyse the untranslatability of “brainrot” humour in Nathasya’s TikTok content and to find the elements that cause translation failure. The method of the research is qualitative descriptive. The theory used in the analysis is Mona Baker’s theory of translation equivalence. Data was taken from a selected TikTok video that had “brainrot” humour expressions and their translations generated by TikTok’s automatic translation tool. By means of observation, documentation, and manual comparative study eleven “brainrot” terms were discovered and analysed. Results suggest that majority of these idioms are not translatable with high accuracy, as their meaning is highly affected by online slang, meme culture, and specific use in some communities. In terms such as "Slay," "Skibidi Toilet Rizz," "Level 10 Gyatt," and "What The Sigma?" loss of meaning, distortion or outright translation failure was found. The present study shows that the problems of translation mostly present on the level of lexical equivalence, culture-specific ideas and pragmatic equivalence. Machine translation algorithms tend to focus on lexical forms and ignore cultural references and comedic meaning present in the source text. As a result, the comic effect is sometimes lost in translation. This study finds that the humour of “brainrot” is very difficult to automatically translate since it depends on digital culture, contextual awareness, and shared online experiences.