TERJEMAHAN DIALEK AFRICAN AMERICAN ENGLISH DALAM NOVEL THE ADVENTURES OF HUCLEBERRY FINN

Abstract

For novelists, dialects can help them to convey a particular message. For translators, however, dialects in the novel they translate can cause problems. It is due to the fact that dialects are linguistically and culturally bounded. This paper tries to highlight the Indonesian translation of African American English (AAE) dialect used by black characters in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The sources of data of the paper are the English version of the novel and the Indonesian translation published by Bentang Pustaka. The analysis of the features of AAE dialect in the source text (ST) shows that among all of the sentences uttered by the black characters, almost all of them (about 95%) contain the features of AAE, in forms of sintax, phonology and vocabulary. The large number of data which show the real characteristics of AAE indicates that the ST writer intended to bring the AAE for a real communication as naturally as possible. Interestingly, the most frequently seen AAE dialect features in the English novel are phonological ones. Considering that it is a written novel, the large number of phonological dialect features in the ST makes the distinct way of speaking of the black characters very clear for ST readers. The Indonesian version, however, doesn’t show particular dialect features. It contains various features of standard Indonesian language. It means that the translator employs naturalization technique for translating AAE dialect. Consequently the distinct speech style of the black characters in the ST cannot be clearly seen in the translation. The information about the social background of the black characters that are from black and the low society cannot be traced from the language used in the TT. Moreover, a note about the dialect used by the ST author is not provided in the translation. Consequently, the readers of the TT will potentially get different reading experience from those of the readers of the ST and cannot appreciate the effort to the ST writer to provide a dialect as a tool of characterization. Keywords: dialect, African American English, black characters, dialect features, translation technique