Deictic Expressions and Their Translation Shifts in Stand up-Comedy by Paul Snyder

Abstract

This study aimed to analyze the use of deictic expressions and translation shifts in three Paul Snyder stand-up comedy performances: Only Introverts Will Understand, Stand-Up at Blue Ridge Club, and Cracking Up for Adoption. Using Levinson’s (1983) five categories of deixis—person, spatial, temporal, social, and discourse—and Catford’s (1965) translation shift classification—level, structure, class, unit, and intra-system shifts—the study employs a qualitative descriptive method. Data were obtained through total sampling of YouTube transcripts and translated using AI-assisted translation with post-editing, following Bowker (2023). The findings identified 100 deictic expressions. Person deixis was the most dominant (38 occurrences), followed by temporal (18), discourse (17), social (16), and spatial deixis (11). Regarding translation shifts, structure shift was the most frequent (47 occurrences), followed by intra-system shift (24), class shift (13), unit shift (12), and level shift (4). The dominance of person deixis reflects Snyder’s self-deprecating comedic style, which frequently refers to himself. Meanwhile, the prevalence of structure shifts indicates grammatical differences between English and Indonesian, particularly in possessive forms, word order, and tense usage. These findings demonstrate that deictic expressions often require grammatical reorganization during translation while maintaining their contextual meanings. The study contributes to pragmatics and translation studies by demonstrating how context-dependent deictic expressions are systematically adapted in the translation process.

Keywords: Deictic expression, Deixis, Translation shifts