scholarly journals TRANSLATING MOCHTAR LUBIS’S SHORT STORY “KULI KONTRAK” INTO ENGLISH: A NOVICE TRANSLATOR’S AUTOETHNOGRAPHY

Lire Journal ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-196
Author(s):  
Novita Dewi

This article is of reflection category exploring the common mistakes often occur in translating Indonesian literary texts into English by a non-native speaker of English. It argues that translation of literary texts is meticulous as it should involve interpretation and fluency in both source and target languages as well as creativity in order that the translated texts communicate equally well. It is the communicative power of translation that makes this undertaking of language transfer miraculous. Applying sufficient principles in translation and creative writing method, this article exemplifies the translation process of Mochtar Lubis’s short story “Kuli Kontrak” into “The Contract Coolies” that appears in the Your Story page of California-based Dalang Publishing bi-lingual website. Autoethnography is the method used in reporting the results. Three main problems that ensue in the Indonesian-English translation of this short story include (1) the concept of time, (2) the non-idiomatic use of body-parts, and (3) the unnecessary use of object construction/ passive voice that often do not translate well in English. By tackling these problems, the English reader may hopefully obtain the meaning-message of the short story as closely as possible to that acquired by Indonesian readers.

Author(s):  
Anne Phillips

No one wants to be treated like an object, regarded as an item of property, or put up for sale. Yet many people frame personal autonomy in terms of self-ownership, representing themselves as property owners with the right to do as they wish with their bodies. Others do not use the language of property, but are similarly insistent on the rights of free individuals to decide for themselves whether to engage in commercial transactions for sex, reproduction, or organ sales. Drawing on analyses of rape, surrogacy, and markets in human organs, this book challenges notions of freedom based on ownership of our bodies and argues against the normalization of markets in bodily services and parts. The book explores the risks associated with metaphors of property and the reasons why the commodification of the body remains problematic. The book asks what is wrong with thinking of oneself as the owner of one's body? What is wrong with making our bodies available for rent or sale? What, if anything, is the difference between markets in sex, reproduction, or human body parts, and the other markets we commonly applaud? The book contends that body markets occupy the outer edges of a continuum that is, in some way, a feature of all labor markets. But it also emphasizes that we all have bodies, and considers the implications of this otherwise banal fact for equality. Bodies remind us of shared vulnerability, alerting us to the common experience of living as embodied beings in the same world. Examining the complex issue of body exceptionalism, the book demonstrates that treating the body as property makes human equality harder to comprehend.


Author(s):  
Bairon Oswaldo Vélez

This paper comments on the first Spanish translation of João Guimarães Rosa's short story "Páramo", which narrates the exile of a Brazilian lost with mountain sickness in a cold and hostile Bogotá. This translation is briefly explained in the following pages, giving special emphasis to some prominent features of the original version, in addition to the cultural context, critical and theoretical readings and the translation strategy evident in the translator‘s intervention. Finally, it is made clear how a certain perspective of the other – present in the original version as well – passes through the translation process and indicates the conditions of its presentation in the target language. The original article is in Portuguese.


Author(s):  
Brandon Shaw

Romeo’s well-known excuse that he cannot dance because he has soles of lead is demonstrative of the autonomous volitional quality Shakespeare ascribes to body parts, his utilization of humoral somatic psychology, and the horizontally divided body according to early modern dance practice and theory. This chapter considers the autonomy of and disagreement between the body parts and the unruliness of the humors within Shakespeare’s dramas, particularly Romeo and Juliet. An understanding of the body as a house of conflicting parts can be applied to the feet of the dancing body in early modern times, as is evinced not only by literary texts, but dance manuals as well. The visuality dominating the dance floor provided opportunity for social advancement as well as ridicule, as contemporary sources document. Dance practice is compared with early modern swordplay in their shared approaches to the training and social significance of bodily proportion and rhythm.


Author(s):  
Moreno Bonda

The investigation of medieval literature poses a number of challenges, even to native speaker researchers. Such difficulties are related to (a) linguistic – syntactical and lexical – obstacles, (b) to the ability to recognise dense networks of interdisciplinary references and, (c) mainly to the cognitive challenges posed by “unfamiliar modes of expression”. The aim of this research is to discuss a methodological approach to deal with these unusual manners of composition, technically known as modal difficulty, in medieval literature. The theoretic setting is represented by Davide Castiglione’s monographic study Difficulty in Poetry (2018) and the specific definition of modal difficulty elaborated by James E. Vincent in the premise of his treatise on American poetry (2003). A study case illustrative of challenges in medieval literature analysis has been chosen to illustrate the speculative reasoning: the references to the celebrated mathematician Leonardo Fibonacci (1170–1242) – known for having introduced the Arabic numbers to the Europeans – in Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Preliminarily, the author discusses unfamiliar mathematical notations implemented from the 13th to the 18th centuries. Subsequently, adopting cognitive linguistics principles and hermeneutic as methodological tools, several veiled citations of the mathematician’s cogitations – such as the chess comparison in Paradise XXVIII, 91–93 and the quadratic expression in Paradise XXVII, 115–117 – are deciphered and illustrated. The analysis of Dante’s cognitive frame indicates that the recourse to Fibonacci’s formulas is functional to depict the incommensurable multitude of the divine in words. In the conclusions, the case studied is adopted as a model to illustrate how the reflection on unusual forms of expression could be employed to investigate ancient literary texts. A preliminary analysis of the frame-notation relation could help, as an example, to recognise mathematical formulas that were expressed in a verbal and non-symbolic notation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Paula Pratt

This article tells the story, and analyzes the development, of a “staged metaphor” for the translation process, from its chance inception over ten years ago, to the more recent revision and staging of the script. In 2005, I was teaching world literature at Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, while also researching the writing of Irish and North African women. I chose to focus on those women writing in Irish, Tachelhit, Arabic, or French, whose work had been translated into English. I was initially inspired by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill’s poem, “The Language Issue,” which compares the "sending forth" of her writing to a potential reader, to the story of Moses being discovered by Pharoah’s daughter. My ultimate goal was to produce a chamber theatre play, based on the Irish and North African texts, which would dramatize a metaphor for the translation process. This was an outgrowth of my doctoral work, in which I had drawn on oral interpretation theorists, who see the performance of literary texts as an accepted means of doing literary criticism. Accordingly, I also expanded the project to include the observations of translation theorists, and I incorporated these into the creation of the script for a chamber theatre performance. After directing a staging of the script in Morocco in 2007, I realized that I needed to add more choreographed movement, and to incorporate the character of Moses’s and Myriam’s mother into the metaphor. The addition of dance, and the foregrounding of the relationship between Myriam and her mother, draws unapologetically on female relationships. It is my conclusion that the revised metaphor, with the addition of these elements, is validated by Yves Bonnefoy’s and Henri Meschonnic's depictions of “translation as relationship with an author,” and that, the metaphor does indeed “provide . . . fresh insights.”


Author(s):  
Iryna Dumchak ◽  
Sofiia Shemerliuk

The article deals with the peculiarities of transformations in the process of translation of English prose into Ukrainian. Despite the large number of works covering this issue, the problem of translating prose texts is not dismissed. There is a need to systematize and study the types of lexical and grammatical transformations, used in translating literary texts, in practice. To observe the process of formation of inter-language transformations, the novel by an Irish writer Colm Toibin ‘House of Names’ has been chosen. The various scientists’ approaches to establishing the transformation types are analyzed. It is revealed that due to differences in the syntactic, grammatical and morphological structures of the English and Ukrainian languages, lexical and grammatical transformations are widely used in translation. Lexical transformations are the deviations from direct vocabulary matches. The lexical transformations are mainly caused by the fact that the volume of the lexical units of the original language and the language of translation do not coincide. Among lexical transformations, the most common are generalization, concretization, compensation, lexical additions. Grammatical transformations are to transform the structure of a sentence in the translation process according to the rules of the source language. The transformation can be complete or partial depending on whether the structure of the sentence changes completely or partially. The article presents the examples of the grammatical transformations of inversion, replacement, addition and omission comparing the original text and its translation.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 161
Author(s):  
Sri Handayani ◽  
Sri Harto

AbstrakPenelitian ini bertujuan menggambarkan pengalaman mahasiswa untuk membangun kepedulian dalam mengatasi masalah khususnya pada penerjemahan puisi.  Data penelitian dikumpulkan melalui kuesioner, wawancara dan observasi kelas yang melibatkan 85 orang mahasiswa semester enam dari dua kelas yang berbeda dan dua orang dosen pengampu mata kuliah Translating Literary Works di  Program Studi Bahasa dan Sastra Inggris pada salah satu perguruan tinggi negeri di kota Bandung. Kuesioner dilengkapi oleh 55 mahasiswa dari 85 yang terlibat dalam penelitian.  Wawancara dilakukan untuk melengkapi dan mengecek kebenaran informasi yang diperoleh melalui kuesioner.  Selain itu, observasi kelas dilakukan di dua kelas paralel untuk melihat aktivitas belajar mengajar yang dilakukan oleh dua orang dosen dan mahasiswa dari dua kelas tersebut. Observasi difokuskan pada materi perkuliahan, metode dan teknik pengajaran yang diterapkan oleh dosen, masalah yang dihadapi dan teknik yang digunakan untuk menyelesaikan masalah dalam penerjemahan puisi.  Data dianalisis berdasarkan beberapa teori penerjemahan yang relevan.  Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa pengalaman mahasiswa yang disampaikan di dalam kelas memberikan beberapa keuntungan bagi mereka karena berbagi pengalaman di dalam kelas mampu: (1) memotivasi mahasiswa untuk menyelesaikan pekerjaan penerjemahan secara lebih serius karena mereka dituntut untuk menyajikan hasil karya terjemahan di dalam kelas; (2) membangun rasa percaya diri mahasiswa dalam menerjemahkan karena hasil terjemahannya akan diberikan umpan balik; (3) melatih kemampuan mahasiswa menganalisis masalah untuk mencari jalan keluar yang sesuai; (4) memperkenalkan mahasiswa terhadap pengetahuan kritis bahasa sumber dan bahasa sasaran; dan (5) membangun kepedulian mahasiswa agar masalah yang muncul dalam proses penerjemahan yang sangat kompleks dapat diselesaikan.Kata kunci: berbagi pengalaman, kepedulian, penyelesaian masalah AbstractThis research was aimed at describing the classroom sharing experiences to build students’ awareness dealing with the problem solving in translating poetry. The data were collected through questionnaire, interview and classroom observation involving 85 sixth semester students in two different classes and two lecturers of Translating Literary Works course at the English Language and Literature Studies in one state university in Bandung city.  The questionnaire was completed by 55 (out of 85) students invited to fill in the questionnaire. Interview was done to complete and cross check the information derived from the questionnaire.  Meanwhile, the observation was administered in the two parallel classes to observe the activities done by the two lecturers and students in the two classes.  The observation was focused on the course materials, teaching methods and techniques applied by the lecturers, problems faced and techniques used to solve the problems by the students in translating poetry. The data were then analyzed based on some relevant theories of translation.  The result of the research showed that the classroom sharing experiences gave some advantages to the students with several reasons: (1) motivating students to do their translation works more seriously since they had to present their translation works to the class; (2) developing the students’ self-confidence in translating the tasks since their translation works were given some feedbacks; (3) training the students to analyze the problems to find out the most appropriate techniques to solve the problems; (4) introducing the students to have more critical knowledge of both source and target languages; and (5) building the students’ awareness of how the problems appeared in a very complex translation process were solved. Keywords: awareness, problem solving, sharing experience


Literator ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mthikazi Rose Masubelele

The meaning of words comes into play when words as units of translation are to be translated from one language into another. Lexical items that are extant in one language but not in others pose enormous problems for translators. The translation of ideophones – which feature very prominently in African discourse – is a case in point in this article. Translators faced with the translation of such forms are required to come up with strategies to aptly express their meanings in the target text. This article seeks to establish how CSZ Ntuli, in his English translation of an isiZulu short story Uthingo Lwenkosazana by DBZ Ntuli, has translated some of the ideophones used by the original author. Translation strategies used by CSZ Ntuli in his translation to express the meanings of the isiZulu ideophones will be brought to light in this article. It will be confirmed that CSZ Ntuli, using different lexical forms in the target language, has effectively changed unfamiliar isiZulu cultural notions to concepts that the English target reader can relate to. It will also be shown that the meanings of the isiZulu ideophones can be expressed in the target language using approximation and amplification as translation strategies provided that the translator has a good command of both source and target languages. The discussion will also look at how various translation scholars view the notion of equivalence at word level, and research on ideophones in isiZulu will also be reviewed.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ed Drewitt

Are you curious about the remains of an animal you have found? This compilation of the most likely found body parts of animals eaten by raptors will help you identify your discovery. Including over 100 species of bird and mammal prey of raptors such as sparrowhawks, peregrines and hen harriers, this photographic guide highlights the common feathers, fur and other body parts found at raptor nests, roosts, plucking posts and other opportunistic spots. Discovering what raptors eat is an important part of confirming their feeding ecology and how this might change over time, vary on a local level or in response to changing prey populations, as well as dispelling myths and assumptions about what certain raptor species eat. Diet studies are vital for the conservation of raptor species; the more we know about what they need for survival the more we can predict and plan long-term for the protection and survival of raptors that may be vulnerable and in decline. This is the first book to show in detail the actual parts of a bird, mammal or other animal that you are likely to find in a garden, woodland or beneath a raptor roost. As more people take an interest in raptors and watch species such as peregrines via webcams and through watch groups, there is greater opportunity for finding prey remains. This book provides the first and most important step in identifying a prey species.


2009 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Mostovaia

AbstractConnotations, or the semantic prosodies of words, are associations acquired through exposure to diverse contexts and may be different for the same language item used by different speakers or groups of speakers. In order to compare connotations of the same language item between groups, tools of comparison are of interest. One such tool is analysis of word frequencies in contexts. This article considers a few hypotheses on gender-linked differences in the use of color words in Russian literary texts. Frequencies of total use of color words, and then of color words modifying nouns referring to body parts, color words modifying nouns referring to clothes, color words which have emotional connotations and of color words used to describe elements of landscape are compared for texts authored by women or by men. For the first three subcategories, it was hypothesized that women on average use more color adjectives in this category than men do. For the last category, it was hypothesized that men use more color adjectives in this category than women do. Two studies have been done to verify these hypotheses. Only the last hypothesis, on greater frequency of color words used to describe landscape in men-authored texts, has been confirmed at a statistically significant level. The hypotheses that women use a greater number of total color adjectives on average, and that women use more color adjectives to modify nouns referring to body parts and clothes, were each confirmed at a marginal level of statistical significance.Another avenue for investigating the limits of the concept “connotation” uses syntactic tests. One can say that a number of phrases in Russian are (un)acceptable or highly unusual because there exists a recurring connotation connecting a certain color with a certain state of affairs. However, it is questionable whether connotations limited to a sociolinguistic group can be tested using syntactic tests.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document