Notes and Glosses in Literary Translation

Erlina Zulkifli Mahmud

doi:10.47191/ijsshr/v5-i1-48

Abstract

Notes and Glosses are two different terms referring to one type of translation procedure namely Notes, Addition, Glosses. Addition is excluded in the title as it is not discussed in this research. This translation procedure is one of the translation procedures whose function is to provide additional information mostly when translating very specific terms like technical terms and cultural words. This research uses three Indonesian novels translated into English as the data source. It is therefore it involves literary translation. The background of this research is that each novel has its own preference dealing with the form of additional information. Using descriptive-qualitative research method with Translation Studies for analyzing the data, this research is aimed at identifying the kind of Notes and Addition involved and revealing the topic of information added both in the source language text and in the target language texts. The results show that the use of Notes either at the bottom of page as footnotes or at the end of book as end-notes and the use of glossary as Glosses at the end of book do not always depend on the additional information given by the authors of the source language texts, the translators may increase the occurrence of the notes in the target text, therefore, the topics of additional information are more various in the target language texts.

Highlights

Being the guest country of Frankfurt Bookfair in 2015 with the target 300 literary works translated into foreign languages mostly English, Indonesia has been given a golden opportunity to expose themselves to the world
Results and Discussions are divided into the existence of additional information in each novel either as the source text or the target text
The number of forms of additional information is identified based on its existence in each novel using translation procedure namely Notes, Addition, Glosses where Addition is excluded

Summary

Introduction

Being the guest country of Frankfurt Bookfair in 2015 with the target 300 literary works translated into foreign languages mostly English, Indonesia has been given a golden opportunity to expose themselves to the world. This gave a very positive impact to Indonesia especially in the publication of its literary works in the source language texts and in the target language texts. The ways of life, the habits, the customs, the beliefs of Indonesian people which have been reflected in the stories are brought to the world and the important role to make this precious information well received to target readers is in the hand of translators. The three novels used as the data source in this research are some of them, the three of them together with their translations took part in the Book Fair in 2015

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion