Inter-Language Translation from Chinese to Indonesian: Strategies and Adjustments

Abstract

Translation usually involves two languages, the source language, and the target language. However, there is a certain situation that compels the use of an intermediary language for translating a source language (SL) text into a target language (TL) text. For example, when the source language texts (such as texts in Chinese) are not easily available in the target language country (such as Indonesia). This paper analyzed the strategies and adjustments made by the translators in doing inter-language translation or translation through an intermediary language, from Chinese to English to Indonesian. The purpose of this research is to compare two versions of translation, the first being the Indonesian translation from English as an intermediary language (IT) and the second is the Indonesian translation directly from Chinese (DT). Research revealed that IT used loss strategy while DT used gain strategy in the form of syntactic and semantic adjustments because there are many culture-specific items of the source language text that are unknown to either English or Indonesian. The findings imply that the translators should have enough skill and knowledge to enable them to accurately communicate the message of the source text to the target text audience.