2025/1 Translation

Other than lexical problems, English differs from Indonesian in terms of grammatical categories. English is marked by tense, number, aspect, and gender. Time in English is grammatically marked, while In Indonesian, it is lexically marked. It means that the change in time in English is indicated by a change of verbs. 

Plural words in Indonesian are indicated by reduplication or the addition of determiner para, kaum, banyak, etc. In English, plurality is indicated by the addition of morpheme –s (chairchairs), morpheme –n (ox-oxen), change of vowels –a into –e (man-men), a transformation of –oo- into –ee- (goose – geese), etc. However, English plural forms may not always be translated into plural in Indonesian. For example: wild plants growing in the forests – tanaman liar yang tumbuh di hutan, not *tanaman-tanaman liar yang tumbuh di hutanhutan*. (Widyamartaya, 1989). Indonesian and English are neither polysynthetic language in which aspect is indicated in the word. According to Baker, 2011: 300, Aspect is a grammatical category which involves using affixes and/or changing the form of the verb to indicate the temporal distribution of an event, for example whether an event is completed (perfective) or whether it is momentary or continuous (imperfective). Both English and Indonesian mark aspect through time indicator.

In translating English sentences into Indonesian or vise versa, it’s important to take aspect into account. The Indonesian aspectualizer is telah which is sometimes translated into “have + past participle”. However, not all completed action can be translated into “have + past participle”. For example, Di tahun 2007, dia telah memiliki anak should be translated into “In 2007, she had a baby”, instead of “*In 2007, she has had a baby*.” English and Indonesian have different affixes to indicate male-female.

Collocation 

 Lexical patterning cannot be expressed in rules, but may be identified as recurrent patterns in the language; such as the likelihood of certain words occurring with other words and the naturalness or typicality of the resulting combinations. Two of the examples are collocation and idioms and fixed expressions (Baker, 1988). Collocation means the tendency of certain words to co-occur regularly in a given language. First, the co-occurrence tendency is related to their propositional meanings. For example: cheque is more likely to occur with bank, pay, money, and write than with moon, butter, playground or repair. However, meaning cannot always account for collocational patterning. Look at the table for the words likely and unlikely co-occur.

When two words collocate, the relationship can hold between all or several of their various forms, combined in any grammatically acceptable order. For example: achieving aims, aims having been achieved, achievable aims, and the achievement of an aim are all acceptable in English. On the other hand, words will collocate with other words in some of their forms but not in others. For example: we bend rules in English but are unlikely to describe rules as unbendable. We describe it as inflexible, instead.

The patterns of collocation are largely arbitrary and independent of meaning. Some collocations are a direct reflection of the material, social, or moral environment in which they occur. This explains why bread collocates with butter in English but not in Arabic. The English collocation reflects the high value that English speakers place on order and the Arabic collocation reflects the high respect accorded by Arabs to the concept of tradition. Some English words have a much broader collocational range than others. The English verb shrug has a rather limited collocational range. It typically occurs with shoulders. Run, by contrast, has a vast collocational range. It typically collocates with company, business, show, car, stockings, tights, nose, wild, debt, bill, river, course, water, and color.

The range is influenced by two factors. The first is its level of specificity; the more general a word is, the broader its collocational range; the more specific it is, the more restricted its collocational range. The word bury is likely to have a much broader collocational range than any of its hyponyms, such as inter or entomb. Only people can be interred, but we can bury people, a treasure, feelings, and memories. The second factor is the number of senses it has. For example: in its sense of ‘manage’, the verb run collocates with the words like company, institution, etc.

Some collocations may seem untypical in everyday language but are common in specific registers. For example: In statistics, the word biased error and tolerable error are acceptable. Register-specific collocations are not simply the set of terms that go with a discipline. It is not enough to know that data in computer language forms part of compound terms such as data processing and data bank and to become familiar with the dictionary equivalents of such terms in the target language. In order to translate computer literature, a translator must be aware that in English computer texts, data may be handled, extracted, processed, manipulated, retrieved, but not typically shifted, treated, arranged, or tackled.

Most collocations have unique meanings. What a word means often depends on its association with certain collocates. When trying to translate the meaning of a word in isolation, we tend to contextualize it in most typical collocations. The meaning of the isolated word depends largely on its pattern of collocation. For example: dry (dry bread, dry sound, dry voice, dry country, and dry humor).

Problems in translating Collocations 

 a. The engrossing effect of source text patterning Translators sometimes may get quite engrossed in the source text and may produce the oddest collocations in the target language for no justifiable reason. For example: strong tea is literally ‘dense tea’ in Japanese. Keep the dog is unacceptable in Danish because they usually ‘hold the cat’. To avoid this problem, translators must not carry over source-language collocational patterns which are untypical of the target language. In Indonesian, “beat the egg” (memukul telur) is uncommon; instead, we say mengocok telur. 

 b. Misinterpreting the meaning of a sourcelanguage collocation A translator can easily misinterpret a collocation in the source text due to interference from his/her native language. This happens because it corresponds in form to a common collocation in the target language. For example, “pay a visit” means berkunjung not membayar kunjungan. 

 c. The tension between accuracy and naturalness A translator ideally aims at producing a collocation which is typical in the target language while at the same time preserving the meaning associated with the source collocation. There is a tension between what is typical (naturalness) and what is accurate (accuracy). Accuracy is no doubt an important aim in translation, but it is also important to remember that the use of common target language patterns which are familiar to the target reader plays an important role in keeping the communication channels open.

d. Culture-specific collocation Some collocations reflect the cultural settings If the cultural settings of the source and target languages are significantly different, there will be instances when the source text will contain collocations which convey what to the target reader would be unfamiliar associations of ideas. In short, collocations are fairly flexible patterns of language which allow several variations in form. Although the meaning of a word often depends on what other words it occurs with, we can still see that the word has individual meaning in a given collocation.