Background of the Analysis

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background of the Analysis

Translation means transferring the meaning of the source language into receptor language Larson 1984:3. Translation is done because the existence of various languages in this world and the desire to know and to understand many kinds of things and information which is written in foreign language. Richards 1985:299 says, “Translation is the process of changing speech or writing from one language source language into another language target language. Process of translation is reproducing the natural equivalent of the source language SL message especially in terms of meaning and style Nida and Taber 1969:12 in Kongres Nasional Penerjemahan 2003:36. There must be correspondence of meaning between source language SL and target language TL. A translator should have a perfect knowledge of the original language, and a competence acquaintance with the subject of which it treats. Of course, it is not easy for the translator to make natural translation and has the exactly same meaning with the source language, because every language has the different structures or grammar, for example, English and Bahasa Indonesia has grammatical differences. Grammar is a description of the structure of a language and the way in which linguistic unit, such as words and phrases are combined to produce sentences in the language Richards 1985:125. English grammar has units; they are sentence, clause, phrase, word and morpheme. Indonesian grammar also has Universitas Sumatera Utara units; they are morpheme, word, phrase, clause and sentence. As what Machali 2000:20 says, “Dalam tata bahasa, kita mengenali adanya hierarki lima satuan bahasa : kalimat, klausa, prase, kata, morfem”. Each of these units has a particular kind of meaningful grammatical pattern. In addition, each of these units is ordered based on their level. Morpheme is the smallest level from these five units. As Nida 1967: 1 says, “Morphemes are the minimal meaningful units which may constitute words or parts of words”. For examples: like, popular, born, -re, -ly, -un or the combinations likely, reborn and unpopular. There are no two identical languages, either in meaning or in the structures Nida 1964 in Venuti 2000:126. Therefore, there can be no absolutely correspondence between languages. However, a translator is hoped to be able to adjust the structure of source language to the appropriate structure in target language and to produce a natural translation. The possible way to adjust the structure of two different languages is by making shifts. Vinay and Darbelnet in Newmark 1988:85 state, “Shifts is a translation procedure involving a change in the grammar from source language into target language”. Shift is required when grammatical structure of source language does not exist in the target language. For example, morpheme –un in English does not exist in Bahasa Indonesia as morpheme also, but as a word which has meaning tidak. Nowadays, many of English books such as novel has been translated into Bahasa Indonesia. This surely brings a great advantage to Indonesian people. Nevertheless, it is possible that shifts also occur in the translated novel. Because Universitas Sumatera Utara shift is useful to convey an idea or meaning in source language so that the idea or meaning in target language can be understood correctly by the readers. One of the greatest novels that has been translated into Bahasa Indonesia is Bloodline created by Sidney Sheldon and translated by Threes Susilastuti. The translator makes morphemic shift to establish equivalent and the exact structure in target language so that the translation could be natural and communicative. For example, markets in SL translated pasar-pasar into TL. Morpheme –s in SL is plural form so that to find the same equivalent in TL, it’s translated by repeating the base form. The fact that the translator faces the condition that forces himher to make shifts to keep the meanings constant so that the messages can be conveyed naturally and communicatively makes me interested in analyzing it. That is shifts usually occur in the translation from English into Bahasa Indonesia. In this thesis, I will analyze the morphemic shifts in the translation of Bloodline into Indonesian Garis Darah by Threes Susilastuti. Thus, the title of this thesis is The Translation of Morphemic Shifts in Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline into Garis Darah by Threes Susilastuti.

1.2 Problem of the Analysis