An Analysis of Undergraduate Students' Difficulties and Strategies to Deal With The Difficulties of Translating Idioms From English to The Indonesian Language

Abstract

Translation is one of the essential skills in global communication especially when we want to learn a new language. Translation is certainly not easy because we as translators are required to transfer languages to each other in order to match the meaning and cultural aspects of both. One of the challenges that translators often encounter is when they want to translate idioms which are part of language expressions, i.e. any linguistic structure (including polymorphic words) whose meaning is not the same as that of the written word (Liu, 2017). Since idioms cannot be translated carelessly, translators are required to go deeper into the meaning of idioms and to choose the most appropriate word with the closest equivalent meaning from the source text to the target text by getting familiar with their use in both languages. In this study, researchers want to find out about what difficulties students often encounter in translating idioms from English to Indonesian. In addition, researchers feel the need to find out more about what strategies students apply when translating English idioms into Indonesian. This study was conducted in one of the universities in Indonesia and involved participants from undergraduate students in one of the English Education Study Programs, Department of Language and Arts Education, Faculty of Education. The criteria for selecting participants are students at one of the universities in Indonesia who have taken translation classes with a minimum grade of B and are willing to be interviewed in this study. This study has used qualitative research as a research method and then analyzed the findings of this study which are described in narrative form. In order to analyze the data, the researcher uses qualitative thematic analysis as a research design, the results of this study revealed two main things: difficulties and strategies in translating idioms from English into Indonesian.