PRAGMATIC EQUIVALENCE AND PERSUASIVE FUNCTION ANALYSIS OF ILLOCUTIONARY ACTS IN ENGLISH-INDONESIAN INSTAGRAM CAPTIONS ON BUTTONSCARVES

Social media captions play an important role in digital marketing by conveying communicative intentions and persuading audiences. In bilingual promotional content, translation is expected to maintain both meaning and persuasive effectiveness. Therefore, this study analyzes illocutionary acts, pragmatic equivalence, and persuasive effect in the English-Indonesian Instagram captions of Buttonscarves. This study employed a descriptive qualitative method using 100 bilingual Instagram captions as the data. The analysis was based on Searle’s (1979) theory of illocutionary acts, Baker’s (1992) theory of pragmatic equivalence, and the AIDA model proposed by Strong (1925). The findings show that representative acts are the most dominant type, accounting for 38% of the source texts and 48% of the target texts. The results also indicate that 84% of the data maintain pragmatic equivalence, while 16% experience pragmatic shift. Regarding persuasive effect, 64% of the data maintain persuasive effectiveness, 25% strengthen it, and 11% weaken it. The study concludes that the translations tend to adopt a more representative and descriptive style. However, these shifts generally do not reduce pragmatic equivalence or persuasive effectiveness. Therefore, successful promotional translation depends not only on linguistic equivalence but also on maintaining communicative intention and persuasive appeal.
Keywords: illocutionary acts, pragmatic equivalence, persuasive effect, translation, Instagram captions.