Revealing Postcolonialism through Unrelated Words Translation Strategy in Translating Toer’s Bumi Manusia into Lane’s This Earth Of Mankind

Abstract

The fast development of translation field entails transferring one culture to another culture. Linguistic elements and the message of a writing, the external background such as culture, political, economic, or even historical background that adheres to the Source Text (ST) inevitably has to be taken to the Target Text (TT). In order to produce an acceptable product of literary translation, a translator has to possess knowledge of Source Text background. This research is aimed at finding out the ideology in unrelated words’ translation strategy in translating Toer’s Bumi Manusia, a winner of PEN Freedom-to-write Awards in 1988 and Ramon Magsaysay Awards in 1995. This novel shows a truthful depiction of what happened back then in Indonesia and the values that were struggled for the society. This novel is translated into This Earth of Mankind. This research gives a perspective regarding postcolonial translation in a way that it reveals the ideology and scope of postcolonialism by observing and understanding unrelated words’ translation strategy. Revealing postcolonialism in This Earth of Mankind is done through translation using unrelated words as the concept expressed by the source item is not lexicalized at all in English in the light of postcolonial translation approach. The findings of translation of the postcolonial novel into English show a great deal in meaning and context alteration, the loss of information, the less impact in reading and interpreting the text, and generalization which universalizes the unique and great Javanese culture as the main setting of the story Bumi Manusia. Translation using unrelated words reveals neo-colonialism which unfortunately still dominates through the work of translation.