Linguistic Difficulties in Translating English to Indonesian and Indonesian to English Sentences of EFL Students
Abstract
This study is used to know the linguistic factors that make university students difficult to translate sentences from English to Indonesia and Indonesia to English. There are five linguistic factors used in this research. They are lexical, dictionary entries, syntactic, ellipsis, and idiom. Therefore, the data was consisted of which type of translation was more difficult and which linguistic factor was the most difficult for university students at the University of Islam Malang (UNISMA).
Hence, the researcher used a descriptive qualitative design to get the data. The data was taken from the students of the fifth semester at A class which consisted of 36 students. 10 students were chosen based on the lowest score in the translation subject and they got a translation test. The translation test consists of 9 numbers to translate from English to Indonesia and 6 numbers to translate from Indonesian to English. 5 students who got the lowest score on the test were interviewed to get deep information about their difficulties with those five linguistic factors.
The result was divided into two based on the research problem. The first was the result of students’ difficulties with linguistic factors when translating sentence from English to Indonesian. The arrangement of linguistic factors from the most difficult is an idiom (9%), ellipsis (50%), dictionary entries (55%), syntactic (62,5%), and lexical (92,5). The higher the percentage, the higher of students correct in translating. It means that the least percentage is the most difficult linguistic factor. Then, the most difficult linguistic factor of translating a sentence from English to Indonesian is an idiom. It is caused by the students who are not familiar with English idiom and prefer to translate it word to word. Therefore, the translation result is not acceptable.
The second was the result of students’ difficulties with linguistic factors when translating sentence from Indonesian to English. The arrangement of linguistic factor from the most difficult is dictionary entries (0%), ellipsis (30%), syntactic (52,5%), and lexical (62,5%). The higher the percentage, the higher of students correct in translating. It means that the least percentage is the most difficult linguistic factor. Then, the most difficult linguistic factor of translating a sentence from Indonesian to English is dictionary entries. It is caused by the students who are lack vocabulary mastery.
Finally, it was suggested for the university students to learn more about the linguistic components, especially in translating sentences both from Indonesian to English and English to Indonesian. Next, the translation class lecturer should be more aware that the students are still lacking in understanding linguistic factors while doing translation tasks. The last is for the next researcher to study more on other factors than linguistic factors in translating tasks of students.
Key Word: Linguistic Factors, Sentence and Translation