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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
A. Background of the Study
Novel, short story, and poem are examples of literary works. Reading a literary work is interesting because people can easily learn about different cultures
from other countries, but the problem is that most of literary works are written in foreign language. To read those literary works in our own language, we need to
translate those literary works. Therefore, translation is an important thing to deliver the message from source language SL to target language TL.
To deliver message from one language to another language, translation has a responsibility to disseminate many kind of literary works into another language.
Specifically in literary work, translation deals with not only words, phrases, and sentences but also culture, society, and knowledge. Therefore, a translation
process is not easy to be done. To understand a story, a reader of fiction must know the meaning of the
story. Therefore, as a translator, understanding and knowing the idea of the story and what the author wants to say through the story is a must. The translator may
not forget to deliver the idea without reducing, or change the message of the text in the process of translating into another language.
There is an interesting issue in translating a text, especially a fiction that has complex sentences and specific terms. When translating a literary text, a translator
has to pay attention to the linguistic, cultural differences, and the target readers.
Because literary works are created artistically by increasing the difficulty and length of perception Huang, 2011:14.
One of the American writers who usually use complex sentences and specific terms is Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe is well-known as a gothic
writer. He wrote many short stories and poems, a text of play and a novel. His fiction is commonly an allusion from his own life. His experience about life which
is complicated made his work full of terror, “provide with murky psychodrama
and extreme conflict ” Miller, 1962: 372-373.
One of Edgar Allan Poe‟s short stories is “The Masque of The Red Death”
which has been translated into Indonesian as “Setan Merah”. In the story, there
are many words, phrases, and sentences which describe gothic. Gothic are P oe‟s
s peciality to describe a horror or something terrible in his story. Poe‟s “The
Masque of The Red Death ” is an allegory about life, death and powerlessness of
human to evade the grip of death. Based on the cont ext of Poe‟s short story, the
use of words or phrases such as the redness and the horror of blood is to give a feeling that the story is full of terror and horror. Translating a fiction story that
uses specific terms will give positive effects, but sometimes it will make the reader confused because of their unfamiliarity.
To know how a fiction story with specific context is translated well in target language TL, this thesis tries to analyze the translation methods that are applied
in the Poe‟s short story “The Masque of The Red Death” into “Setan Merah”. A right method is needed to translate a text, because a method can influence the
result of translation. Therefore, it can be assumed that a right method in translating will result a good translation which can be understood by the reader.
In order to get a same feeling from ST to TT, a translator have to know the cultural background, because gothic terms that appear in ST may not be translated
into TT because of the cultures different. Gothic originally was applied to a tribe of Germanic barbarians, and this term became associated with ghost stories and
horror novel because early gothic novels were associated with Middle Ages. The gothic terms
that appear in Poe‟s short story are interesting to analyze, because there are different perceptions when translating gothic terms to
Indonesian culture with the “Gothic” in Western culture. The differences between Indonesian cultures with Western cultures
highlight the translation methods applied in translating the gothic terms into Bahasa Indonesia. Therefore, choosing the right method to make a close
equivalent in translating a translation is an important thing, because it can avoid misunderstanding.
The readability of the translation gothic terms in Poe‟s “The Masque of
The Red Death ” into “Setan Merah” is also analyzed in this research in order to
know how readable the translation is.
B. Problem Formulation