Cultural Transfer in Indonesian Dubbing of Encanto

Abstract

This study examines how cultural aspects are rendered in the Indonesian dubbing of Disney’s Encanto. Rather than treating culture-bound expressions as isolated lexical problems, it approaches dubbing as multimodal cultural mediation: verbal choices must remain intelligible and performable while interacting with image, music, gesture, and the narrative’s Colombian setting. A qualitative content-analysis design was applied to the English soundtrack and Indonesian-dubbed version of the 102-minute film. Cultural units were identified, transcribed, coded using Newmark’s five cultural categories, and interpreted through close comparison of source and target dialogue. The supplied dataset reports 558 units; however, an audit of its detailed frequency table produces 569, a discrepancy that is retained transparently and should be reconciled against the transcript before publication. The table nevertheless shows a clear pattern: socio-cultural references are most salient, led by kinship, followed by social organization and material culture. Close readings indicate selective retention of Spanish/Colombian markers (e.g., Casita), explanatory reformulation of food and ritual references, and target-oriented substitutions for idioms (e.g., knock on wood → amit-amit). The article argues that Indonesian dubbing generally preserves Encanto’s family-centred cultural logic while recalibrating culturally opaque forms for oral accessibility. It contributes an auditable framework that combines cultural taxonomy, dubbing constraints, and translation-function analysis for Indonesian audiovisual translation research.