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no absolute synonymy between the words from both of the language. As a result, there will always be something lost and something gained during the process of
translation and the translators might be accused of reproducing several parts of the text and of betraying an author’s intention.
b. The Common Problems of Non-Equivalence
From the previous theory, we have understood well that there are some differences in the form of meaning of each language. These differences make the
translator a little bit difficult to conduct his or her project, especially when the translator finds out that there are some words from the source language that do not
have a clear reference in the target language. In relation to this, definitely some problems make the translator’s work a little bit difficult to conduct. Baker 1992: 21-
26 states several problems of non-equivalence below:
1. Culture-specific concepts
The source language word may express a concept which is totally unknown in the target culture. This concept may be abstract or concrete and this concept is
specific to certain aspect such as a religious belief, a social custom or even a type of food. The examples of this problem are privacy, speaker of the House of Commons
and airing cupboard. For the second one, the term is usually translated into Chairman especially in Russian; whereas, the term Chairman possesses another meaning and
definition.
PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
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2. The source language concept is not lexicalized in the target language
The source language word may express a concept which is known in the target culture but simply not lexicalized, which means that the concept is not
‘allocated’ in the target-language word. We can see this clearly from the word savoury. The word savoury has no equivalent in many languages, including Bahasa
Indonesia, even though the concept of this word is very easy to understand. Another example is the adjective standard that means ‘ordinary’ as in standard range of
product expresses a concept that many people can easily understand but still the word does not have any equivalent in many languages as well.
3. The source language word is semantically complex
This problem is quite common in the art of translation. This problem refers to the condition where a single word that consists of a single morpheme can sometimes
express a more complex set of meanings than a whole sentence. The reason is that language develops very concise form for referring to complex concepts if the
concepts become important enough to be talked about by the user for most of the times. We do not usually realize how semantically complex a word is until we have
to translate it into a language that does not have an equivalent for the word. There is a good example for this problem. In Brazilian language we can find the word
arruacao which means ‘clearing the ground under coffee trees of rubbish and piling it in the middle of the row in order to aid in the recovery of beans dropped during
harvesting.’
4. The source and target language make different distinctions in meaning
