Challenges in translating Indonesian reduplication into English

Abstract

The articles reflects how reduplication matters in the process of transferring meaning from the source language into the closest equivalent meaning in the target language. Indonesian reduplications are varied in their types and meaning that cover reduplications of verbs, nouns and adjectives and each has its own function such to indicate plurality in reduplicated noun, to indicate repeated action, to convey intensity, to emphasise or to form other meaning from the root. This study aims at investigating the types of Indonesian reduplication and the types of translation procedures applied in retaining the meaning of Indonesian reduplication into English as the target language. Descriptive translation study is applied as it provides a method for the description of language use in translation in the form of parallel corpora. The results show that the types of Indonesian reduplication are: full reduplication, partial reduplication and reduplication (stem and affix), and the translation procedures found are couplet, equivalent, modulation, and synonymy. This study gives the implication that in translating Indonesian reduplication into English; the translator should fully comprehend the meaning of the reduplicated word in the source language before defining its equivalent in the target language in order not to distort the meaning being expressed in the source language when it is transferred into the target language