Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Subtitling a nature documentary for a global audience is not simply a matter of finding target-language equivalents for a source narration; it is an exercise in pragmatic inference under constraints of space, time, and channel. This article examines how the English-to-Indonesian subtitles of Netflix’s Our Planet: Migrations manage the recovery of intended meaning across four episodes, using the Audience-Centred Subtitling Adequacy (ACSA) framework to assess subtitle quality along three interacting dimensions: Micro (readability and processing ease), Meso (pragmatic alignment of intent and stance), and Macro (global coherence and accessibility). Four groups of trainee translators, each working on one episode of the series, independently scored a combined 44 subtitle segments. Pooled results show consistently high adequacy (Micro M = 4.52, SD = 0.70; Meso M = 4.43, SD = 0.93; Macro M = 4.52, SD = 0.82, all on a 1–5 scale), but with the Meso dimension showing the greatest variability and, together with Macro, the lowest individual scores in the dataset. Qualitative analysis of the lowest-scoring segments shows that adequacy loss concentrates at points where a subtitle is locally accurate but narrows, domesticates, or destabilises the pragmatic stance and ecological register of the source narration. We argue that this pattern is consistent with a relevance-theoretic account of subtitling as constrained pragmatic inference, in which explicature, implicature, and presupposition must be calibrated to the addressee’s cognitive environment, and that the ACSA framework offers a tractable, pedagogically useful operationalisation of this calibration for subtitler training and quality assessment.</p>