TRANSLATION IGNORANCE: A CASE STUDY OF BILINGUAL SIGNS

Abstract

As a country that is famous for her natural beauty and friendly people, Indonesia becomes one of worldtourism destinations and many foreign people visit this country. In order to provide better service, manybilingual public signs, Indonesian – English, are placed in public areas. Unfortunately, due to structuraand cultural differences between Indonesian and English, the intention of providing information is oftenhampered. Further, because of translation ignorance there are many misleading bilingual public signsthat may create confusion. In fact, public signs, regardless the language command, should evoke similareffect to the readers so that the terms used should be familiar to the target readers. On the other hand,there is no standard in translating public sign so that different public facilities may put different versionfor similar sign. This paper is going to map the method of translation applied in translating signs inseveral public areas in Surabaya and analyse the common mistake of the signs. It is expected that peoplerealise the importance of proper bilingual signs and the authorities will pay more attention to thetranslation activity, especially in producing bilingual signs and thus reducing translation ignorance.