Translating Children's Illustrated Story Books: Challenges in Translating Linguistic and Cultural Aspects by Students of English Diploma 3 Program UNS at Ganesa Library

摘要

Ganesa Library (GL) is a Non-Government Organization in Central Java that serves local people more than 3,000 books collection, 70% written in Bahasa Indonesia and 30% in English (http://ganesastudycenter.org/). The latter, which consists of various types of books such as novels, comics, children's story books, is directly imported from USA by the founders of the library, Debra Lunn dan Michael Mrowka (Harjono, 2016). Those books need to be translated into Bahasa Indonesia in order to benefit the community. For this reason, the availability of human resources of students of English Diploma 3 Program of Universitas Sebelas Maret (UNS), who are projected to have language competence and translation skills when they graduate from the department, could answer the need of it. Since 2016, with one student, could translate approximately 15 to 20 books through an internship program, hundreds of GL's English children's story books have been translated by the students. In other words, their translation in the form of bilingual books has already given advantages to the library visitors. However, the translation produced by the students could not be merely used as a yardstick to state that they have produced a qualified translation. The absence of qualified translated books risks the reputation of the library and the self-quality of the students. Considering students' translation competency, potential of gap between teaching and learning process in campus and real translation activity, a research to identify and to map linguistic and cultural challenges faced by the students in translating children's story books at GL and to propose a general guideline of translating linguistic and cultural issues within children's books is necessary to conduct. This study was qualitatively done by conducting Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with 12 students, interviewing students' internship supervisor of GL, looking into the students' final project reports, and analyzing 45 bilingual books before the objectives of this study were finally determined. Findings show that linguistic difficulties faced by the students cover limited English vocabulary, inappropriate diction for children, wrong meaning understanding of particular sentences, and the use of the wrong phrase in books title. Cultural challenges include less understanding of source text cultural context; culture-related onomatopoeias; high culture-related colloquial phrases; names of flora, fauna, artefact and habit; and community life development. Detailed interesting findings, completed with examples, could be found in this paper, in line with the proposal of general guidelines in translating linguistic and cultural items in children's illustrated story books.