INTEGRATING CULTURE, SONG LYRICS AND TECHNOLOGY IN TRANSLATIONCLASS

Abstract

Translation class which is dominated by writing activity can be dull and boring for university students if it is not well organized. Some teaching techniques are introduced to minimize the dullness of lecture. One of them is using students’ interest, that is using song lyrics rather than article taken from text book as the source text. This teaching technique can be the best alternative since almost all students like music and sometimes they do not know the meaning of the song they sing or if it is Indonesian song, they can not find the best equivalent in English. This teaching technique can be considered as personal learning because the students can choose any song lyrics they like. By using song lyrics students will find the excitement and enthusiasm while they doing the tasks which they cannot find when they are translating articles, especially when they are asked to do the task using their own laptops. Nowadays, less students bring dictionary in the class because almost all of them have dictionary programs or application such as kamus.net, indotranslate.com and googletranslate in their laptops or smartphones. Some of the programs and application can translate not only a word, but phrases and even sentences into the target language. This effortless way of translating has missed one important point in doing translation, that is culture. Culture in this discussion should be seen in a broad sense. Culture is not only understood as the advanced intellectual development of mankind as reflected in the arts, but it refers to all socially conditioned aspects of human life (cf. Snell-Hornby, 1988: Hymes, 1964). With technology, students can easily type the words, phrases and sentences into the search box in their dictionary program or application but the outcome is sometimes awkward and unsuitable to the target language. The outcome of translating process should be natural and suitable to the target language as Nida and Taber (1969) stated that translating consists of reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the source language message, first in terms of meaning and secondly in terms of style. A translation process should involve culture to find the best meaning and style in the target language so that the text can be as natural as it can be. Moreover, Will in Noss (1982: 3) stated that translation is a transfer process which aims at the transformation of a written source language text into an optimally equivalent target language text, and which requires the syntactic, the semantic and the pragmatic understanding and analytical processing of the source language. It is clearly stated that culture takes important role in translating process and students need to learn to involve culture in the translation process in interesting and exciting ways. In this teaching technique, students are given English song lyrics and they are asked to translate them in Indonesian and they are also given Indonesian song lyrics and they are asked to translate them into English.