Cultural Consideration in Pretty Woman Subtitling

Subtitling is an activity which includes some factors to consider. This paper shows which translation puts culture into consideration and which one does not. The Indonesian translation taken from the film The Pretty Woman was looked at and analyzed to find out what the translator did to make the subtitle polite from the Indonesian culture. The finding shows that the translator translated the swearing words with the equivalence, some were not translated to keep the acceptability in the Indonesian culture, and the impoliteness occurred when the translator just translated the address terms in the similar way with the source text. It can be concluded that the film translator should be able to produce subtitle which is not only linguistically proper, but also culturally polite to be accepted by the target community. The statement is in line with Bell’s idea (1991), that a translator should have grammatical, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competences. Key words: culture, politeness, society, subtitle.