An Analysis of Cultural Specific Items Classified as Social Culture Found in The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien And Strategies Utilized to Translate The Indonesian Version

Abstract

Cultural Specific Item is said to be one of the hardest concepts to translate by quite a number of researchers. One of them, Baker (1992:23-44) presented eight translation strategies for translators to consider when they encounter difficult issues such as CSIs. On the other hand, Newmark (1988:94-103) composed five taxonomies of cultural words by adapting Nida. Out of five taxonomies, social culture was the most predominantly found in the object of research with more than 300 data and 46% overall. The purpose of this research is to find the most applicable translation strategy to translate CSIs in the social culture category. Methods that were applied in the process of this research are the comparative model in translation studies (Williams and Chesterman, 2002) and comparative research (Mills, 2008). Data were obtained from the source text, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, and the target text, The Things They Carried: Kenangan Sang Prajurit translated by Hendrayatna. The researcher has reached several conclusions, for instance, only seven out of eight translation strategies were utilized to translate social culture in the target text. Second, translation by paraphrasing using unrelated words was the most applicable strategy with a huge margin of 38% compared to other strategies with a percentage below 20%.