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CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
A. Areas of Research
This study focuses on two areas of research by William and Chestman 2002: 6. The first area is
“Text Analysis and Translation”. This study aims to analyze the text and its translation. Therefore, this study conducts a further
analysis on the ST and TT. Since this study is about the influence of gender in translating a text, the study focuses on one source text which is taken from
Nicholas Sparks’s
A Walk to Remember
. In relation to the influence of gender, the researcher needs to compare the ST to the TT. The TT itself is taken from the four
students, two females and two males. The second area is
“Translation Quality Assessment”. This research needs some reviewers, namely respondents. The respondents are the general
readers or ordinary readers. The purpose of the respondents reading the translation, ST and TT, is to make sure whether the TT is equivalent and readable
or not. The respondents should assess the translation translated by female or male subjects translators. The theories of readability and equivalence are contributive
to this second area because readability and equivalence are the exact parameter to assess whether a translated text is qualified or not.
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B. Object of the Study
The object of this study is the novel written by Nicholas Sparks entitled
A Walk to Remember.
The novel is first published in 1999 by Warner Books and contains 13 chapters and 94 pages. This novel is a romantic novel that portrays
certain romantic elements throughout the story. In this novel, the romantic elements are portrayed through the sentences. In this study, the sentences
containing romantic elements are being analyzed to prove whether or not gender influences the process of translation. Therefore, male and female respondents
become the subjects of the study.
C. Method of the Study
In order to make the study specific, the text that was analyzed was Nicholas
Sparks’s
A Walk to Remember.
The four subjects who translated some of the romantic texts in Nicholas Sparks’s
A Walk to Remember
were the English Letters Department students two females and two males of Sanata Dharma
University who had taken and passed Translation I and Translation II courses with minimum score eighty. The translated texts made by those four students were
analyzed by the researcher to identify whether or not the translated text of Nicholas Sparks’s
A Walk to Remember
was equivalent
.
If the translated text was equivalent, the researcher would classify which TT was included to formal
equivalence and dynamic equivalence. After that, the researcher assessed whether the translated texts made by the four subjects were readable or not.
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In assessing the readability, the researcher provided several questionnaires to twenty respondents. The respondents determined whether the
translated texts made by the four subjects were readable or not. Nida and Taber’s
four basic requirements of readable translation were the guidelines for the respondents to decide the readability of the translated texts. Finally, the difference
that the researcher would analyze is the specific expressions produced by either male or female translators in the translated texts. The analysis was assisted by the
theory of language and gender that could show certain indicators to prove whether the initial belief that female translators could produce stronger intimacy in a text
was true or not.
D. Research Procedure
1. Type of Data
a. Objective Data
The study has two data as its objectives. The first data were several sentences taken from the novel
A Walk to Remember
by Nicholas Sparks which contained the romantic elements. The texts were taken from the original novel in
the English version. The second data were taken from the results of translations made by the subjects in this study both female translators and male translators.
b. Affective Data
The affective data were taken from twenty respondents through questionnaires that consisted of ST, TT by two male subjects translators, TT by