Domestication and Foreignization Strategies in Indonesian Subtitling: Analyzing the Translation of Cultural-Specific Terms in a Translated "Eat Pray Love" Movie.

Abstract

Audiovisual translation increasingly carries intercultural narratives across languages, yet how subtitlers balance comprehensibility against cultural authenticity when a single film moves through several source cultures at once remains underexamined, particularly in the Indonesian context. This gap matters because most existing Indonesian subtitling studies isolate a single culture or strategy, leaving unanswered how domestication and foreignization are negotiated jointly within one multicultural narrative. This study addresses that gap by examining how domestication and foreignization strategies are applied to culture-specific items (CSIs) drawn from Italy, India, and Bali in the Indonesian subtitles of Eat Pray Love (2010), and how the two strategies jointly shape cultural transfer for Indonesian viewers. The primary data source was the film's official Indonesian subtitles; fifteen CSIs were purposively selected as the unit of analysis based on cultural salience, absence of a direct Indonesian equivalent, and narrative importance. Each item was transcribed alongside its English source line and analyzed using a qualitative descriptive design guided by Pedersen's (2011) subtitling taxonomy, with classification cross-checked by two raters to strengthen credibility. Domestication was applied to 11 items (73%), mainly through adaptation (6 instances) and paraphrase (4 instances), supporting comprehension of unfamiliar rituals and concepts. Foreignization accounted for 4 items (27%), realized through retention, calque, and gloss, reserved chiefly for well-known foods, proper names, and religious references to preserve cultural authenticity. The study's novel contribution is showing that this choice is category-sensitive rather than uniform: greetings and rituals were consistently domesticated, while person and religious names were foreignized in every instance, a pattern not previously documented in a single multicultural film corpus. This indicates that subtitlers act as active cultural mediators whose strategic choices track the type of cultural item at stake, balancing accessibility with preservation of cultural identity.