The Translator’s Strategy as a Cultural Mediator in Translating Indonesian Novel into English

A Case Study On “Jatisaba”

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.201215.065How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Cultural capital, cultural mediator, cultural terms, translator’s strategy, translator’s visibility

Abstract

This article discusses a study on the translator’s strategy in producing an Indonesian-English translated work (Indonesian-English literary work) entitled “Jatisaba”, a novel that is full of Javanese (Banyumasan) cultural terms and expressions. Since the translator is a cultural mediator, this study aims to unravel more the strategy of a translator in transferring an Indonesian work full of cultural terms into English. A practice run by a literary translation agent that potentially enables international readers to appreciate the Indonesian author’s work and knowing further cultural identity carried out through literary work. Agent in this present study refers to a translator namely Christopher Allen Woodrich, an English native speaker who is considered to have sufficient cultural capital on Indonesian literature due to his academic background. As the framework of thought, this socio-cultural study adapts the Bourdieusian concept of strategy in the theory of cultural production. Meanwhile methodologically, interview and document selection are applied as techniques to gain the data. At the end of the study, it is found that the translator uses the strategy to enable readers to understand the work being translated, while at the same time also keep the local colour of it. This strategy potentially helps raise the translator’s visibility. Besides, this study also discloses how cultural capital is significant for translation practice.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - M. Yuseano Kardiansyah
AU  - Aprinus Salam
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/17
TI  - The Translator’s Strategy as a Cultural Mediator in Translating Indonesian Novel into English
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (ICOLLITE 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 413
EP  - 418
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.201215.065
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.201215.065
ID  - Kardiansyah2020
ER  -