ANALYZING THE TECHNIQUES AND QUALITY OF TRANSLATED INSTRUCTIONS ON ‘CODENAMES’ BOARD GAME

Abstrak

Digital board games are entertainment games where thinking strategically and enjoyable interaction occur; they are products that contain specific gameplay conventions - which could be influenced by the original culture or language - from their origin countries. As these particular games are distributed, translation comes along and plays a role: adapting the original content to the existing elements in that specific target language. The clarity of the instructions has to be clear and precise because board games rely on written explanations in the cards, rules, the board game, and the roleplaying characters. If one or more are translated inadequately, then the higher the chance of players to misinterpret the content and fail to experience the game as intended. Furthermore, a previous study conducted by Ardi (2016) believed that a selection of translation techniques could shape the overall quality of a translation. Therefore, it is highly mandatory to conduct this research by focusing on both distinct fields. This research investigates the Indonesian version of ‘Codenames’ board game instructions with two primary objectives. First, it is to identify the translation techniques employed in translating the original source (English) to the target language (Indonesian); and second, to assess the quality of the translation based on the aspects of Accuracy, Acceptability, and Readability. The study adopts Molina and Albir’s (2002) classification of translation techniques and Nababan et al.’s (2021) translation quality assessment as its theoretical framework. The analysis demonstrates that 14 different translation techniques are utilized in the dataset, indicating considerable variation in strategy selection. Among these, Literal Translation appears most frequently, suggesting a strong tendency to preserve the structural and semantic forms of the source text. Linguistic Amplification ranks second, reflecting the translator’s effort to add explicit information where necessary to support clarity. In terms of quality evaluation, the overall mean score of 2.69 indicates that the Indonesian instructions can generally be categorized as good. Accuracy (2.70) and Readability (2.86) obtain high scores, implying that the translated content successfully conveys meaning and remains easy to understand for target readers. However, Acceptability records a slightly lower mean score (2.59), signaling that certain segments require further adjustment to better conform to Indonesian grammatical patterns and cultural conventions. Overall, the findings suggest that while the translation is effectively transferred and coherent, refinement is still needed to enhance its naturalness in the target language context.