Indonesian-English Translation of Idiomatic Noun Phrases: Its Techniques Review

Idiomatic noun phrases become interesting to be discussed since the occurrence of the phrase’s elements have an implicit meaning that should be understood by the speaker of the language. In order to transfer the meaning of the Indonesian idiomatic noun phrase into English, the translator should be able to transfer the meaning or message of every single word or the combination of words in the phrase from the source language into the target language. Related to the phenomena, the current research was conducted. It was a descriptive qualitative study. The data were taken from an Indonesian novel entitled “Bumi Manusia” by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, and its translation product in English by Max Lane entitled “This Earth of Mankind”.  In analyzing the translation techniques used in the translation of Indonesian idiomatic noun phrases, the authors used the theory proposed by Molina and Albir (2002). From the analysis, it can be concluded that the techniques used in the translation of Indonesian idiomatic noun phrases into English found in the data source are adaptation, transposition, establish equivalence, generalization, description, literal and amplification. In the translation result, we can see that the translator tried to transfer the equivalent implicit meaning of idiomatic noun phrases into target language text and to make the target text can be easily understood by the target reader.