Translating Politeness: Adapting Directive Speech Acts in Children’s Storybooks for Indonesian Culture

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-321-4_53How to use a DOI?

Keywords

politeness strategies; directive speech acts; parent-child interactions; cultural norms; children's literature translation

Abstract

This paper examines the translation of politeness in directive speech acts within children’s storybooks, focusing on parent-child interactions. Directive speech acts inherently threaten the hearer’s face, requiring politeness strategies. The study analysed five children's books in English and their Indonesian translations using content analysis based on Brown & Levinson’s politeness theory. The findings reveal that parents in both source text (ST) and target text (TT) use bald on-record, positive politeness, and negative politeness strategies. However, positive politeness is more prevalent in the TT compared to the ST, while bald on-record directives decrease, making parents in the TT sound more polite. The TT also displays a greater number of positive politeness sub-strategies of using in-group identity markers. These modifications reflect Indonesian cultural norms, emphasizing nurturing parents. As for children, the results show that while bald on-record strategies dominate in the ST, the TT shifts towards a higher use of positive politeness strategies, particularly marked by the frequent use of kindship address froms to male and female parents, indicating a more respectful and relationship-oriented tone. Negative politeness strategies remain consistent between the ST and TT, reflecting children’s attempts to show deference and minimise imposition when addressing their parents. These findings highlight the importance of cultural context in translating politeness strategies in children’s literature, demonstrating that modifications in translation can effectively convey social and moral values, constributing to the character-building of Indonesian children.

Copyright

© 2024 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Ida Kusuma Dewi
AU  - Dyah Ayu Nila Khrisna
AU  - Bayu Budiharjo
AU  - Herianto Nababan
AU  - Mangatur. R. Nababan
AU  - Fenty Kusumastusi
PY  - 2024
DA  - 2024/12/24
TI  - Translating Politeness: Adapting Directive Speech Acts in Children’s Storybooks for Indonesian Culture
BT  - Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Communication, Language, Literature, and Culture (ICCoLliC 2024)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 695
EP  - 708
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-321-4_53
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-321-4_53
ID  - Dewi2024
ER  -