THE DIFFICULTIES OF
UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN TRANSLATING IDIOMS ENGLISH-INDONESIA (qualitative)
A.
THE
BACKGROUND OF THE RESEARCH
Today
in the globalization era, science and technology in the world has grown rapidly
in any area of life. Even, we can communicate with others in distance place
easily and get nearly all sort of information from all over the world because
of the sophisticated technology. To comprehend what has been communicated or
informed, we should have good command of the language involved. However, every
country all over the world has their own language and rules that differ from
one to another. It occurs for all elements of languages: grammar, phonology and
semantics. To overcome the problem arising from the various languages,
translation has a very important role.
Translation
will be very important thing to do if we get much information which is written
in foreign language. Translation can open the information that early people
knew nothing. Even, translation can omit the partition between countries, and
means of cooperation, understanding and peace in the world. In addition, in the
modern century people demand to be able
to follow the development of the era.
Along
with the growing need of the books from some fields such as science,
technology, literature, etc, our country had
been flooded with foreign books, whether they are gifts, donations, or
imported goods. Those books varied in language and form, range from popular
knowledge text books to novels. There has been pro and contra about
whether Indonesian publishers need to
translate those books into our own
language or let those books published in their original language and form. The
pro-side claims that translation is indeed very important in helping the
readers to understand the contents of the book since the text are presented in
foreign language. On the other hand, the contra-side insists that translation can
ruin the whole meaning and messages that the foreign authors try to convey in
their writing.
Translating
is not an easy task because each language has its own rules in phonetic,
structure and words. In translating sometimes the translator finds some problems
dealing with the equivalence that he/she could not find in the target language.
One of translation problems is dealing with idiomatic expressions. Hornby
(1995:589) asserts that “idiom is a phrase or sentence whose meaning is not
clear from the meaning of its individual words and which must be learnt as a
whole unit”. Idiomatic expressions are used in both oral and written language.
In addition, they are used in informal situations such as in conversation with
our friends.
