A COMPARISON OF TRANSLATION TECHNIQUES APPLIED BY TRANSLATION LEARNERS AND PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATORS TO GET NATURALNESS OF A TRANSLATION TEXT

Abstract

ABSTRACT This research aims to compare the translation techniques used by professional translators and translation learners in translating an essay and the researcher compares the resulted naturalness. The data sources were the English version and the Indonesian translations of an essay entitled Women in Gold. The essay was translated into Indonesian by three professional translators and fifteen translation learners (English students of Jendral Sudirman University). The data were collected by note taking techniques, then were analyzed by using content analysis techniques. Twelve readers as the raters were asked to rate the naturalness of the translated essays. The results show that there are thirteen techniques used by the translation learners and twelve techniques used by professional translators. The most frequent technique used by the translation learners is literal translation (27.45%), followed by established equivalent (21%), and reduction (9.80%). Those used by the professional translators are amplification (27.5%), established equivalent (18.75%), and reduction (15%). The chosen translation techniques affect the degree of naturalness. High naturalness score (score 3) given to translation learners’ translated text ranges between 42.36% to 75%; while the same score given to professional translators ranges between 75% and 91.66%. These figures show that as a whole, the professional translators produce more natural texts than learners. Despite the different degree of naturalness resulted, the choice of modulation and amplification techniques works well in both groups; although amplification is not among the three dominant techniques with the highest naturalness score (score 3), the score is still good (82.57%). Meanwhile, literal translation techniques used by learners result in only 49.74% of good naturalness.