AN ANALYSIS OF FLOUTING MAXIMS AND THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES IN PRESERVING IMPLICATURES IN BRUNO MAJOR’S ALBUM “TO LET A GOOD THING DIE”

Song lyrics occupy a distinct place in creative literature, frequently communicating meanings that extend well beyond what the words literally say. Bruno Major, a British indie pop and neo-soul singer-songwriter, has built a reputation for the lyrical depth of his 2020 album To Let a Good Thing Die. Throughout the album, his lyrics consistently flout Grice’s maxims to produce layered implicature meanings, which makes them particularly demanding for non-English-speaking listeners to fully interpret. Platforms like Musixmatch have tried to close this gap by offering Indonesian translations of his songs; yet whether those translations actually retain the pragmatic depth of the source text is a question that has gone largely unexamined. This study addresses three interconnected issues: which types of maxim flouting appear in the source lyrics and what implicatures they produce, which translation techniques were used in the Musixmatch Indonesian translations, and and how effective those techniques were at preserving the original implicature, assessed by whether the inferential pathway of the source lyric (SL) is maintained in the Indonesian translation (TL). Working with Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle, Molina and Albir’s (2002) taxonomy of translation techniques, and a descriptive qualitative design guided by Spradley’s (1997) ethnographic analytical model, the study analyzed all ten songs on the album and identified 98 instances of maxim flouting. The Maxim of Quality was flouted most frequently at 58.2%, followed by the Maxim of Manner (16.3%), the Maxim of Quantity (14.3%), and the Maxim of Relation (11.2%). Seven translation techniques were found, with Literal Translation accounting for 78.6% of cases and Modulation for 11.2%. Of the 98 translations assessed, only 46 (46.9%) were found to have successfully preserved the original implicature, while 52 (53.1%) did not. These results indicate that surface-level translation approaches are generally inadequate for capturing the pragmatic complexity of maxim-flouting lyrics, and that techniques engaging more directly with the inferential dimension of meaning, Modulation in particular, tend to produce better outcomes even when applied sparingly.