intuitive writing of the author. To increase the interest of translator in the literary works, the translator deals with complex issues of social and cultural element. The
general beliefs of the difficulty and the worthiness of transferring literary product are related to cultural theories, post-modernism, and value judgement refracted
through prejudice of class, gender, nation and race. Literary translation challenges the translator to get the authority of the canon, the nationalism of culture, and the
„death‟ of the author Baker, 2001: 127. One of literary works that has been translated is Ayu Utami‟s Novel
entitled Saman. When the readers have the ability to comprehend the literary work fully, it gives pleasure and make readers want to share the story. The theme of
Ayu Utami‟s Saman, is a close friendship which is associated with religion, god, nation, spirituality, struggling for the human rights, and also underlining the
sexuality from women perspective that is still taboo in a Soeharto‟s authoritative regime and it leads to the controversial issues. In addition, this book mentions
many particular terms that only exist in a certain area of Indonesia and those have no equal terms in any other culture or language. It is a complicated literary work
which contains a lot of culture-specific terms. Therefore, the culture-specific terms play an important role in the book and it takes part in defining the main
theme and reflecting the local wisdom where the story takes place. The obstacle is when it is presented in another language which contains another partial
information about the source language and culture. The literary translation requires the source language tone, style, flexibility, inventiveness, and knowledge
of the source language culture that will build the consideration to know the culture-specific terms.
7. Saman Novel
Ayu Utami is an Indonesian author. She is an award-winning Indonesian writer who won the 2000 Prince Clause Award Laurate. This novel also won the
Romance Art Competition in Jakarta and quickly became one of the greatest Indonesian novels. It is a novel about the reflection of Indonesian society and the
political situation in military regime. Saman is a controversial novel published in 1998. This novel has been translated into eight languages and it is never translated
from the second language to keep the originality of the novel. The story about a life of four sexually-liberated girls, Shakuntala, Cok,
Yasmin and Laila. The latter has Laila own problem which is about to giving her virginity to a married-man named Sihar. However, secretly two of them have a
feeling toward a man from their childhood. Saman emphasizes female‟s
perspective of sexuality that is still taboo and criticizes the regime of Soeharto era which is called
“Orde Baru”. At that time, human rights were useless since in reality Indonesians had become corrupt and lazy, increasingly bureaucratic, and
without a feeling of sportsmanship under the leader of Soeharto who had been ruling this country about 32 years. Through the main character, Saman, it reflects
the anxiety of the writer who once lost her belief in God and also about her belief in Indonesian culture regarding to the virginity of each Indonesian woman.
Saman novel has many unusual Indonesian words that refer to specific thing or terms in Indonesian cultures. It carries various local wisdom from several
parts of Indonesia Java, Indonesia, Sumatera. Local wisdom is not easy to be translated, it contains values that do not have the equal meaning. The culture-
specific terms are coloring every chapter in this novel with a deep knowledge in aesthetic ways.
8. Previous Studies
There are several studies about culture-specific terms that have been done by several researchers. The researcher here picks two examples, the first one
is based on Ligita Judickaitė research in 2009 entitled “The Notions of Foreignization and Domestication to Movie Translation: Analysis of Subtitles in
Cartoon Ratatouille.” The purposes of the study are to find out the types of culture-specific terms to form foreignization and domestication continuum and to
identify the English culture-specific items and their translation techniques used in cartoon Ratatouille. As the result, there are four techniques related to
foreignization, those are preservation, addition, naturalization, and literal translation. Furthermore, there are six strategies related to domestication; cultural
equivalent, omission, globalization, translation by a more specific word, creation, and equivalent. The result of this study are that the translation analysis of culture-
specific items that include names of food, dishes, wines and occupations in cartoon Ratatouille shows that the majority of these items are domesticated in the
Lithuanian subtitles of the cartoon, globalization and equivalent translation being the most frequently used translation strategies and The results of the comparative
analysis of spoken English discourse translation in the Lithuanian subtitles of the
