Forms and Functions of Dysphemism Utterances in Imroah Inda Nuqthis Shifr Novel and Its Translation

Abstract

One of the challenging task for the translator is Switching the language of one language to another that has social and cultural differences and the peculiarities of the characteristics of both. Imroah Inda Nuqthis Shifr novel by Nawal El Sa’dawi published in 1990 is a story of a woman and her sentence to death for her crime of murdering a prostitute. This novel is translated into Indonesian version as Perempuan di Titik Nol novel. The dramatic potrayal illustrated by the author brings a lot of vulgar words used. Regarding with term of vulgar words or it is known as dysphemism, this paper aims to find out the motives and their implementation of functions of translating dysphemism expressions in Perempuan Titik Nol novel as the Indonesian version of Imroah Inda Nuqthis Shifr. The data collection was conducted by reading the novel thoroughly and taking notes on the utterances in forms of words and phrases containing dysphemism both in the original novel and its translated version in Bahasa Indonesia. The data that had been collected are subsequently categorized according to the utterances and their translation functions. There were found 31 expressions (utterances) containing dysphemism. The thirty one findings were grouped into twelve categories (motives). The most frequently occurring dysphemistic utterances was epithet (4), while the least appearing one was voice (1). Most of the utterances containing dysphemism in the study were functioned to characterize the identity of a group.