AN ANALYSIS OF TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES AND ACCEPTABILITY OF TECHNICAL FOOTBALL TERMS IN FOOTBALL MANAGER 26 MOBILE GAME

This study aims to identify the types of technical football terminology found in the official Indonesian localization of Football Manager 26 Mobile, to analyze the translation techniques applied, and to evaluate the acceptability of the translation results. The method used is qualitative descriptive. Data were collected from three in-game menus: player roles, player attributes, and tactical instructions, and classified based on Sager’s (1990) typology of technical terms. This study identified the translation techniques using Molina and Albir’s (2002) framework and evaluated the acceptability of each translation through FGDs with raters based on Nababan et al.’s (2012) model. The results show that the most dominant type of technical term is the complex term, reflecting the nature of football vocabulary, where precise meaning consistently requires more than one word. The most frequently used translation technique is literal translation, which tends to stay close to the source text when direct Indonesian equivalents are available. The overall acceptability score falls in the less acceptable category, suggesting that while most translations are received positively by Indonesian football audiences, certain translation decisions, particularly the retention of untranslated English phrases and the assignment of the same Indonesian term to two different source language roles, reduce the overall quality of the localization.

Keywords: acceptability; Football Manager 26 Mobile; technical football terms; translation quality; translation techniques.