Pragmatic Failures in Translating Thai Subtitles in Movies: A Case Study of the Barbie Movie

Abstract

This research examines the pragmatic failures in the Thai subtitle translation of the Barbie movie. Pragmatic failures occur when the translation fails to convey the intended meaning, which leads to the recipients not understanding or misunderstanding the context. The study collected data from the Thai subtitles of the Barbie movie, which faced significant criticism on social media for mistranslations in both linguistic and sociological aspects. The samples were six scenes of the Barbie movie that were intentionally chosen using the three-act structure, focusing on pragmatic failure in translation, specifically pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic failure. The research used descriptive qualitative methods to analyze and describe the failures in the subtitles. The findings revealed 27 instances of pragmatic failures in the subtitles, consisting of 25 pragmalinguistic failures and 2 sociopragmatic failures. The pragmalinguistic failures were mainly related to deixis, with person deixis being the most common. The sociopragmatic failures were found only in request speech acts. Despite the identified failures, this research aims to inform and address how these two types of pragmatic failures can impact the audiences' interpretation and comprehension. Nevertheless, the ideal translation does not exist. While a perfect translation may be unattainable, this research seeks to provide insights that could contribute to the enhancement of translation practices in the audiovisual translation field, particularly for subtitle translation in Thailand.