The Untranslatability Of Texts: Highliting Some Basic Contrasts Between English And Indonesian

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

As an effort to render meaning of an SLT into a TLT, a translator may encounter various problems. The problems may not only be due to linguistic contrasts between the two languages, but to cultural and geographical contrasts where the two languages are used as well. This writing has tried to highlight some basic contrasts between English and Indonesian in linguistic, cultural and geographical aspects that cause the translation problems. The examples presented here show that there are concepts in English which are entirely untranslatable into Indonesian because the two languages are used in two different regions and cultures. A certain concept is present in English, but is absent in Indonesian and vice versa. A certain concept exists in both English and Indonesian but the speakers of both languages have different perspective on the thing symbolized by the concept. So, although it is linguistically translatable, but is culturally unacceptable. Therefore the translator may not only encounter problems that are due to linguistic contrasts but also those due to cultural and geographical contrasts. 1. THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION “Translation” is a very popular term. It is widely known and spoken not only by translators but also by laymen. Being aware or not, those who are bilingual or multilingual are always involved in the process of translation. They translate concepts from their native language into other languages as they speak. For most people, their understanding of translation is the transfer of meaning from one language to another (interlingual translation). But actually translation process does not operate only between two languages but between a language itself (intralingual translation) as in “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language (Jakobson, 1959:233). When we go back to the psychology of child’s language learning, it is believed that translation process occurs in the mind of the child as claimed by Paz (1992:152-154). He says: “when we learn to speak, we are learning to translate; the child who asks his mother the meaning of a word is really asking her to translate the unfamiliar term into simple words he already knows. In this sense, translation within the same language is not essentially different from translation between tow languages, and the histories of all peoples parallel the child’s experience ...”. However, our focus in this paper is not on that type of translation. The focus of our attention here is on interlingual translation as it is the type of translation where most people are involved. Numerous definitions have been put forward by translation theorists in the literature of translation and three are quoted below. We will see that, to some extent, they have similar understanding of translation although it is expressed in different terms. Catford (1965:20) defines translation as “the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by equivalent textual material in another language (TL). According to Larson (1984: 3) “... translation consist of transferring the meaning of the source Universitas Sumatera Utara language into the receptor language. This is done by going from the form of the first language to the form of the second language by way of semantic structure. It is meaning which is being transferred and must be held constant. Only the form changes” Papegaaij & Schuberd (1988:11) state: “To translate means to express in another language the content of a given text .... The objective of translation is to replace the form and to preserve the content of the text”. The three definitions quoted above essentially give the basic understanding of translation. Larson, Papegaaij & Schubert explicitly say that the meaning (content) of the source language text must be preserved in the target language text. The form may change. Catford uses the phrase “equivalent textual material” to replace the term meaning. Thus, we may conclude that translation is not just the process of changing the form, but also the reexpression of the meaning which is appropriate or natural in the target language (the language into which the text to be translated). In order to preserve the SLT into the TLT, of course, the cultural values and even the ideologies adopted by the readers of the translation (in their native language) should be taken into account by the translator as a translation can be linguistically intelligible but is culturally bizarre. The process of translation does not really look very complex as diagrammed by Larson below. Source language Receptor Language (Target Language) Discovering Reexpressing the meaning the meaning (Quoted from Larson’s, 1984) Text to be translated Translation