THE TRANSITIVITY PROCESS AND ERROR IN CULTURAL TERMS FOUND IN THE CONTEXT OF BILINGUAL CHILDREN STORYBOOK: GOOB AND HIS GRANDPA BY SEAN COVEY (INDONESIAN VERSION)

Abstract

When translating literary work for children, it can be regarded as a way to connect and spread cultures from two or more different countries. In translation, this includes giving equivalent meaning in the target language, and this book, from English to the Indonesian language. Because the translated works in this study are children’s literature and the target readers are children, the translator is expected to adapt the translation into a language that is easy to understand by the children. Meanwhile, the quality of translation in this book is considered to be lacking because it mostly used the language that is used by the adults. Thus, Systemic Functional Linguistics comes into use as the primary theory. Systemic Functional Linguistics is a type of grammar developed by Halliday in Introduction to Functional Grammar which is done based on the model of language as social semiotics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004). Therefore, Systemic Functional Linguistics can be applied as a base to analyze a translation of children’s storybooks through the transitivity process. This study focuses on analyzing the transitivity process and error in cultural terms found in the bilingual children’s storybook “Goob and His Grandpa” in the Indonesian version. In this study, the author used a descriptive and qualitative approach by analyzing word level and phrase level as the translation units. The author provides tables and figures to show the results of the analysis of the transitivity process and error in cultural terms found in the book. In conclusion, the author found that there are several errors and issues of different perspectives to how the translator translated the text inside of the book that makes the story difficult to understand by the children because of the language used by the translator and the characteristics of the children and children’s storybook itself.