Problems and Solution of Translating Unique Banking Terms from English into Indonesian

摘要

Very few studies have been conducted on the banking agreement translation involving two languages of two different legal families. As a matter of fact, the translation of such agreements is getting more and more important in this globalized business world. This paper reports a study conducted to investigate how the terminology of a bank-client agreement is translated from English (common law) into Indonesian (civil law). With the subjects of four translators and one editor at a translation agency in Indonesia, this study analyzed the source text (ST) and target text (TT), provided collected data using questionnaires from the translators and interviewed the editor. The translators were not specialized legal translators, but they had experience in translating various kinds of text types, including legal texts. The editor had a long experience as a translator. The findings show that the translators tried to understand the meaning of the terms by contextualizing them and studying parallel text. It was also found out that there were two types of banking terms, i.e. traditional and non-translational service-related terms. The data also show that the terms of non-traditional banking services posed more problems. To find the candidates for equivalent terms, translators did five strategies, from studying examples from parallel texts to consulting online dictionaries. on the translators' decision-making step on the candidate terms to choose, it was also found that literal translation was used when the translators were not sure about a term meaning or no familiar synonymy was found. Later, it was also shown by the editor that sometimes literal translation did not work. When synonym and literal translation did fit, or when misunderstanding was predicted to occur, the editor resorted to borrowing or adding an extra word. These findings shed light on the problems and solution taken in translating the terminology. However, similar studies need to be done on other legal text types.