THE APPLICATION OF COMPENSATION STRATEGY IN TRANSLATION A Case Study of Andrea Hirata’s Laskar Pelangi - Rainbow Troops

Abstract

This paper focuses on one of the translation strategies (Tunspar & Reid, 2002), which is compensation. This concerns the loss and gain in translation, where not all linguistic features of a source language (SL) can be adopted correspondingly to a target language (TL). As for this, the loss in a translation segment is often compensated on another. The objective of this research is to describe the compensation strategies in practice. We here take Rainbow Troops, the English version of Andrea Hirata’s Laskar Pelangi. There are many English novels translated to Indonesian, but Rainbow Troops is pretty much the opposite (Indonesian novel translated to English). Our findings indicate that compensation strategy applied quite frequently, and the loss in one segment is compensated on another. A sentence in SL is not always be translated in the same level: some sentences in SL were chunked into few sentences in TL. The opposite (merging) applied as well. The loss-gain information structure in Rainbow Troops does not completely reduce the readability. In fact, this compensation preserves the coherence. We here conclude that the equivalence of Rainbow Troops is not achieved on sentence level, but on textual level.