In this paper, we adopt symmetric interior penalty discontinuous Galerkin (SIPG) methods to approximate the solution of nonlinear viscoelasticity-type equations. We construct finite element space which consists of piecewise continuous polynomials. We introduce an appropriate elliptic-type projection and prove its approximation properties. We construct semidiscrete discontinuous Galerkin approximations and prove the optimal convergence in $L^2$ normed space.