EQUIVALENCE IN THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF CULTURAL TERMS IN PRAMOEDYA ANANTA TOER’S THIS EARTH OF MANKIND

摘要

This paper aims to investigate Indonesian cultural terms in a novel entitled Bumi Manusia and their translations in the English version of the novel, This Earth of Mankind. The result of this study shows that there are 116 cultural terms found in the novel Bumi Manusia. By using qualitative method, the cultural terms were categorized into 12 cultural categories including personal life, social life, ecology, public life, customs and pursuits, private passions, toponyms, anthroponyms, forms of entertainment, means of transportation, fictional characters, and measuring systems (Espindola, 2005; Newmark, 2010). The English translations of the cultural terms were analyzed based on the types of equivalence, whether the translations belong to natural equivalence or directional equivalence (Pym, 2007). According to the data analysis, 38 of those cultural terms found in the novel belong to personal life category and the remaining cultural terms are distributed into the other 11 categories. Personal life is a cultural category which encompasses food, housing term, and clothing (Newmark, 2010).This shows that Indonesian culture has many specific terms in referring to traditional food, clothes, and housing terms. Meanwhile, most of the English translations of the cultural terms belong to natural equivalence. Natural equivalence is the sameness between an original text and its translation which is achieved naturally because there are equivalent translations available in the target language (Pym, 2007). In general, Indonesian cultural terms in the novel have been well translated. By using some translation strategies, the translator has made the translations easy to understand.