Translation of the Sense and Form of the Language Play in R. Dahl's James and the Giant Peach

DOI

10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.98How to use a DOI?

Keywords

translation; language play; sense; form; enjoyment

Abstract

In the process of translation, ideally speaking, translators have to put into consideration both the form and the sense of the words. The form deals with the style or the construction of the words in the target language, while the sense deals with the content or the meaning of the words. Problems may occur when it comes to the translation of both the form and the sense as this very often cannot be done. In this case, translators will be faced with some alternatives: (1)to keep the form or the sense or (2)the form and the sense or (3)neither the form nor the sense. When the form is not well translated, the entertaining function will not work well. When the sense is not kept in the translation, the core of the story will not be accurate as told in the original story. The paper discusses the language play found in Roald Dahl’s children’s novel James and the Giant Peach, first published in 1961 and its translation in Indonesian found in James dan Persik Raksasa, which was published by PT. Gramedia Pustaka Utama in 2010. Language play itself is language used mainly for entertaining function; hence, a writer usually exploits or manipulates the linguistic features. In the source language, Dahl uses a great variety of language play forms, covering the phonological, morphological, and semantic language plays. However, due to space constraints, the paper will focus on the phonological language play only. The phonological play involves the use of alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia, and rhyme, which all contribute to the fact that language wise, this novel is highly entertaining. In the translated version, most of the data show that the translator mostly keeps the form and the sense, which is something exceptional, considering that the English and Indonesian languages are two distinct languages, whose forms are almost impossible to compare, let alone to translate. However, the translator’s chosen strategies result in the fact that the enjoyment of reading the novel in the translated version can still rely on both the story itself and the novelist’s creativity in playing with the language, as they are transferred quite well to the readers.

Copyright

© 2018, 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  - Trisnowati Tanto
PY  - 2018/08
DA  - 2018/08
TI  - Translation of the Sense and Form of the Language Play in R. Dahl's James and the Giant Peach
BT  - Proceedings of the Fourth Prasasti International Seminar on Linguistics (Prasasti 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 534
EP  - 539
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.98
DO  - 10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.98
ID  - Tanto2018/08
ER  -