The Impact of Translation Shift Techniques on the Quality of the

Translated Text of the Novel "And the Mountains Echoed"

into Indonesian

Samsudin Hi Adam and Silvani Umar Ali

Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Universitas Khairun, Ternate, North Maluku, Indonesia

Keywords: Translation shift, Technique, Quality of the translated text of the Novel.

Abstract: Rapid growth and increased contact have made our world smaller. Transferring various types of information

from developed countries to developing countries, such as Indonesia, will be difficult without the presence

of translation. The role of translation, therefore, will be increasingly important in bridging this

communication gap. The massive translation efforts undertaken by major nations have been an outstanding

achievement. The quality of a translation into a target language is of great importance. Nevertheless, the

realities show the quality of the translation, especially in literary texts, has often been a problem because the

messages contained in translated text suffer from various kinds of the meaning shift. Such shifts can create a

distortion of the meaning in a target language. The choice of “And The Mountains Echoed” novel by

Khaled Hosseini as an object of analysis is relevant. High schools and college students in Indonesia are

being given “And The Mountains Echoed” as assigned reading. The author expresses all of these themes in

varieties of language styles and in many cultural terms. This study aims at analyzing the following: (1) The

techniques of translation shift (2) The Ideologies applied in translation, (3) To assess the impact of shift

techniques and Ideologies on the quality of the translated text novel into the Indonesian Language. This

research takes a qualitative approach and content analysis method which uses textual and comparative

analysis. The technique of data collection analyzes the source text (ST) and target text (TT) then compares

both to generate a data corpus. The results of this research are expected to contribute to the development of

linguistics especially in the field of translation and become a reflection for teachers, students, lecturers,

translators and researchers who are interested in the field of translation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Globalization connects diverse communities from

different backgrounds, cultures, nations and

languages. Translation is the access to innovation in

science, technology and culture from developed

countries to developing countries, such as Indonesia

would be difficult without the presence of the

translation. Therefore, the role of translation will be

increasingly important in bridging the

communication gap in this global interaction.

Translation into a quick and effective way to transfer

knowledge and technology.

Indonesia becomes a fertile ground for foreign

literature to thrive and spread its wings, this

phenomenon is caused by the consumption of

translation readings high enough. This is

corroborated by many outstanding books of literary

translation from a foreign language into Indonesian,

even many publishers change direction to become a

publisher of translation books. However, the quality

of the translation is not proportional to the needs of

communities in Indonesia, for example, the

translation of the novel did not escape the criticism.

The critics question many foreign language novels

(English) which are translated less well so the idea

and the information delivered by the author of the

text of the source language is not got by the readers

of Indonesia. It also occurs in translation of the

novel "And the Mountains Echoed" into Indonesian,

some of the information from the source text into the

target text is lost, this inaccuracies caused a shift in

meaning. The gap in the translation of the novel And

the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini becomes

the cornerstone for this research.

120

Adam, S. and Ali, S.

The Impact of Translation Shift Techniques on the Quality of the Translated Text of the Novel "And the Mountains Echoed" into Indonesian.

DOI: 10.5220/0008898101200124

In Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Teaching and Learning (ICTL 2018), pages 120-124

ISBN: 978-989-758-439-8

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

As for the previous research is from Parisa Farrokh

from English Department, Islamic Azad University

of Lahijan. Iran 2011 with title "The Equivalence

and Shift in the Persian Translation of the English

Complex Sentences. This research aims at finding

the kinds of equivalent and shift in Persian

translation into English in complex sentences. In his

research, he classified the data into two main

categories namely equivalent and shift. The research

of Parisa Farrokh contributes on teaching translation

both theory and practice but this research still has a

weakness namely only focusing to disclose the types

of equivalent and shift that occurs in complex

sentence without further analyzing against the

impact of the shift of translation, so this research has

not been fullest in assessing the translation quality.

Therefore, researcher does research on the text of

novel "And The Mountains Echoed" the work of

Khaled Hosseini from English into Indonesian is to

reveal the impact of the application of the technique

of translation shift on the quality of the translated

text of novel.

The existence of a system that is different

between the source language and the target language

results in translation having many problems. One of

the problems with translation is equivalent. The

Equivalence is the macth between the contents of the

source text and the target text. Shift techniques are

often used to solve these problems, both form shift

and meaning shift. Catford (1965) affirmed the

viewpoint of linguistic theory, a shift starts from

formal equivalent in the process of transferring from

the source language to target language. Formal

equivalent is the categories in the source language

that occupies the appropriate place or in the same

place in the target language. In translation, formal

shifts are very possible with respect to efforts to

make a reasonable translation result. Catford

affirmed there are two types of shifts, namely level

shift and category shift. Level shift occurs when an

element of target language at one linguistic level has

a translation equivalent at a different level. Category

shift occurs when the category in the source

language has a different form or occupies an unequal

place in the target language. The basic categories in

language are units, structures, and classes. Thus,

category shift includes unit/level shift, structure

shift, and class shift. The shift in translation does not

only occur in form but also in meaning. This

meaning shift causes distortion of meaning in the

target language. Newmark (1981) stated that

translation is an activity that requires expertise or

competence. In translation, Equivalent searches

become a very important factor, to overcome the

translation problem of equivalent, strategy

competency is needed, meaning that the translation

strategy is used when the translation process takes

place starting from the stage of text analysis to the

transfer of messages to the target language. Lorscher

(2005) confirmed the strategy as a procedure used in

translation to solve translation problems. Mona

Baker (1992) offerred several strategies to overcome

the equivalent problem in translation with a bottom-

up approach, it starts from the equivalent of words

and phrases, then grammatical, textual and

pragmatic equivalent. Equivalent problems occur at

various levels, starting from the word level to the

textual level. This arises due to grammatical,

semantic and socio-cultural differences between

source languages and target languages. Another term

used by Molina and Albir (2002) is translation

techniques, they asserted that translation techniques

are a procedure for analyzing and classifying how

translation equivalent takes place and can be applied

in various lingual units.

3 RESEARCH METHOD

This research is descriptive qualitative research. This

approach used based on consideration that data

studied is qualitative data in the forms of words,

phrases, clauses and sentences coming from text

data source of novel "And the Mountains Echoed".

The data described and adapted to the objective of

the research. This research is in particular a library

research based on interpreting the existing data.

Interpretation of this data is inseparable from the

role of researcher in interpreting data based on

background, historical context and understanding of

previous researcher (Creswell, 2003). In other

words, the interpretation of data in qualitative

research is "reflective" research because the

qualitative approach puts researcher as subject in the

interpretation of data. In more detail, the research

method includes four stages of research, namely: (1)

the selection of the object, (2) data collection, (3)

data validation, and (4) data analysis.

4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The application of techniques and method

determination are a strategy pursued by the

translator as an attempt to produce a high quality of

The Impact of Translation Shift Techniques on the Quality of the Translated Text of the Novel "And the Mountains Echoed" into Indonesian

121

translation. From the results of the data analysis can

be explained that the application of the translation

techniques and the translator's ideology tendencies

have an impact on the translation quality of the text

of novel "And the Mountains Echoed" into the target

language (Indonesian). The research data are amount

of 766 data. It is seen that the translator used the

translation techniques that varies between among

others a single technique with the amount of 614

data, the application of couplet techniques 89 data,

then the 27 data is translated into by applying triplet

techniques and 4 data is translated with the

application of the quartet techniques. The following

examples are shown in the table below.

Table 1: Frequency of Application of the Translation

Techniques.

Category of

Translation

Techniques

Total

Percentage

Single

Techniques

614

80%

Couplet

Techniques

11.7%

Triplet

Techniques

3.6%

Quartet

Techniques

0.6%

Total

766

100%

Thus it is clear that the application of a single

technique is more dominant in the translation of the

text of novel "And The Mountain Echoed" compared

to other double translation techniques. This is related

to the nature of the translation technique applied by

the novel translator which is more focused on the

micro level, meaning that this single translation

technique tends to translate lingual units under the

level of sentences, clauses, phrases and words.

Because grammatical units in the form of sentences,

clauses, phrases and words are formed from lingual

units that are at the micro level. Furthermore, the

application of the technical category used as an

overall finding in the translation of the literary text

in the novel "And the Mountains Echoed" into

Indonesian will be described in the following

diagram.

Diagram 1: Frequency of Application of the

Translation Techniques.

Impact of Translation Techniques

Translation as a decision-making process in

interlingua communication events is understood as

an equivalent problem solving process both at the

macro and micro level based on the value system

and the translator's perspective. One of the

objectives of this research is to find out the impact

of the application of translation techniques, the

ideology of translation and to know the translation

quality. Because the facts show that the application

of translation techniques is not always directly

proportional to the translation quality. This most

likely occurs because the translator has been wrong

in making a decision in his translation.

The results of this research indicate that out of

766 source data, 715 (93%) were translated

accurately, 32 (4%) were less accurate and 19 (2%)

were translated inaccurately. In the acceptability

aspect, 747 (97.6%) data were accepted and 19 (2%)

data were not acceptable. From the readability

aspect, 755 (98%) data have a high level of legibility

while 11 (1.5%) data have a moderate level of

legibility. The results of this research also show that

the dominance application of translation techniques

in a single category is more, then reduction

techniques, modulation techniques and pure

borrowing techniques. But in the application of pure

borrowing techniques, it has the effect of meaning

shift which results in the target language readers

losing some of the source language writer message.

It is clear that the text translator of novel "And The

Mountains Echoed" has a competency in the field of

translation that is quite good based on data analysis,

there are 93% data are accurate in translation, means

that the results of the translation are categorized as

high quality. But on the other hand the inaccuracy in

applying translation techniques resulted in some

source language messages not reaching the target

language readers. This is evident in the application

ICTL 2018 - The 1st International Conference on Teaching and Learning

122

of pure borrowing techniques which tend to obscure

the source language message. In translating the text

of the novel "And The Mountains Echoed" into

Indonesian it is clear that the translator's decision-

making process in the translation is embracing the

foreignization ideology, although in some cases also

the application of domestication is seen. The

tendency of foreignization ideology is characterized

by the application of pure borrowing techniques that

preserve cultural terms into the target language, on

the one hand have a positive impact on the reader

because it introduces the terms of the culture of

source language, but on the other hand it also has a

negative impact on the target language readers

because some the terms culture of the source

language that is preserved in his translation is not

understood by the reader, meaning that the target

language readers lose some of the information

conveyed by the source language writer. The

translator should apply annotation or description

techniques that can describe these cultural terms.

5 CONCLUSION

From the results of data analysis of this research, it

can be concluded that in the findings of this research

it is identified that data translated by translators are

not only applying a single translation technique, but

also combining techniques namely couplet

techniques which is the application of two

translation techniques, triplet techniques or three

variants of techniques, and quartet techniques or

four variants of techniques applied together in

translation of the novel. The application of a single

technique is 614 data (80%), couplet technique 89

data (11.7%), triplet technique 27 data (3.6%) and

quartet technique 4 data (4%). From 766 research

data 715 (93%) data were translated accurately, 32

(4%) data were less accurate and 19 (2%) data

translations were not accurate. On the readability

aspect, 98% data has a good readability level and

1.5% data has a fair readability. The dominance of

the application of reduction, modulation and pure

borrowing techniques on the translated text of novel

"And The Mountains Echoed" but the inaccuracy of

the application of pure borrowing techniques can

lead to a shift in meaning, the target language

readers lose some of the source language

information. In the research of the novel "And The

Mountains Echoed", the translator adheres to the

foreignization ideology, this is characterized by the

application of pure borrowing techniques which

preserve the cultural terms of source language into

the target language, although the domestication

ideology is also seen in certain cases in this

translation. Accuracy in the application of

translation techniques in literary texts needs to be

the concern of a literary translator.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Professor Emzir at Universitas

Negeri Jakarta and Grant Olson, P.hD at Northern

Illinois University, USA for their valuable expertise

and warm supports.

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