CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1.1 The Background of the Study
Nowadays, people
do communication in their life. They use the language and understand their own environment. Sometimes,
there are some words or phrases in their
language that they use in their daily life which can not be understood by other
people. For instance, the people who
live in Jakarta know that “kereta” is a train (a lexical meaning). But in Medan, people
understand that “kereta” means a motorcycle.
This is means there are particular terms in the language which are used in their own environment and are only
understood by the members of the community in question. Generally, the term is well known
as a nonstandard language named slang
(Adams, 2009: 48).
Hornby (2000) states that slang
as very informal words and expression that are more common in spoken language, and are
used for some particular purposes.
Slang sometimes is used to
distinguish the people to another. The example in the previous paragraph showed that slang is used
to identify members of a group, between
Medan people to Jakarta people. Teenagers use slang to create identity in order to be different from adults and
Afro-American people use slang to distinguish them from white people. But nowadays, all
people generally and especially in United
States use slang in every part of their daily life. Slang can spread outside their original area, but also can lose in
their area. Slang is usually used extensively in American TV, films, music, literature and in
conversations among native English speakers.
Indonesian
people do enjoy music, books and films which contain slang from other countries. Nowadays, it can be seen
there are many translated novels are displayed
in the books stores in Indonesia. Most of those books sometimes use literary language and slang. Patridge (1937)
commented that the reason why nonstandard language such slang words may be used
by an author is simply to make character
speak in a more realistic way. Non-standard language is incorrect not only from a grammatical point of view, but also
from an ethical side. This conditionputs non-standard language in contrast with
standard language.
Schjoldager (2008) states that
translating non-standard language such slang words is not a simple task. Even though the
skilled translator has understood the original
of the source text, the cultural background, and the social level, the problem of translation still remains of how to
reproduce the different variety of English and how to transfer it to another language. Thus,
it needs some strategies of translation in order to overcome these issues.
Translation itself has several
definitions. According to Catford (1965) translation is “the replacement of textual
material in one language (source language) to another language (target language).”
Moreover, Baker (1988) defines that translation
as an activity of transferring a text one language to another from but still keeps the equivalence and the relation between
the source texts to target text.
In order to achieve the
equivalence in translating slang words and phrases, the translators face several matters which do not
only deal with the equivalence of the form
in text, but also with some problems. There will be a lot of different words, phrases, and etc that do not have a very
similar meaning in target language because of varieties of language communities. One of
the varieties of language community is slang.
In some films or novels, the author use slang words which can not be recognized in by the reader of target language
(Baker, 1992) The matters of equivalence
at word level and above word level such phrases often occur in translation. The problem
occurred at word level has no direct equivalent
words or phrases in target language. The common problems of non equivalence at this level are stuck at culture
– specific concepts, the source language concept is not lexicalized in the target
language, the complexity of source language word and etc. The strategies that commonly
used in solving this problem are also given.
For example: “… “Derick-T’s new ride is tight” (SL) “… “mobil baru Derick-T
keren” (TL) According to Merriam - Webster (2011) Tight means having elements
close together.
But according to 1990 Slang’s
Dictionary (2006) tight means great, the best. The translator used cultural substitution where he
reproduced the meaning of tight -great, the
best- and translated into “keren”. “Keren” in Indonesia means good looking (for
person), or very good in appearance (for
things). This word is usually used by the Indonesians in showing a thing which is really
good.
Based on Baker’s equivalence’s
theory, the slang words and phrases in the novel “Akeelah and The Bee” will be analyzed in
this thesis. The writer will analyze both
words and phrases of the slang that appear in the novel of “Akeelah and The Bee”. The source language is English and the
target language is Indonesian This novel is entitled “Akeelah and the Bee” is a
novel written by James W.
Ellison which talks about a life
of a little girl who joined a spelling bee competition, which has become the United States tradition
more than one century. This novel is straightly
based on the process of the Spelling competition. The novel is based on the screenplay of the film entitled “Akeelah and
the bee” that was written by Doug Atchison.
This novel was published by Yayasan Obor Indonesia in 2007 (Ellison: 2007).
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar