ANALYSIS OF ADJECTIVE CATEGORY SHIFTS IN THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 SUBTITLES AND THEIR IMPACT ON TRANSLATION ACCEPTABILITY

This study examines how English adjectives in The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) are rendered in Indonesian subtitles, focusing on the category shifts used and their effect on subtitle acceptability. Guided by Catford’s category-shift theory, Rozakis’ adjective classification, and Nababan et al. 's acceptability model, 99 adjective pairs were extracted from the official Netflix subtitles and analysed qualitatively. Each adjective was classified as common, proper, compound, or indefinite, then assessed for four shift types: class, structure, unit, and intra-system. Two professional raters evaluated acceptability. Common adjectives dominated the corpus (77.78%). Class shifts (49.49%) and structure shifts (42.42%) were the primary strategies. Structure shifts—mainly the noun-adjective order change required by Indonesian—produced the highest acceptability score (mean = 2.85), preserving natural flow and political nuance. Class shifts, which often changed adjectives into verbs or nouns, scored lower (2.42) when they overstated formality or altered tone. Indefinite adjectives were hardest to adapt (mean = 1.75), showing that vague quantifiers easily lose clarity when shifted. Overall acceptability averaged 2.55—generally natural but with room for refinement. Findings highlight that selecting a shift type must account for adjective class and discourse context to protect meaning and acceptability. The study offers practical guidance for subtitle translators working with politically charged material and enriches translation-shift research by spotlighting adjectives—an often overlooked but meaning-heavy word class in audiovisual translation.