Indonesian Dishes in the English Target Novel

Abstract

This article discusses how Indonesian dishes in an Indonesian source novel are translated into the English target novel. The ingredients of the dishes may be universal as they can be found in any other dishes all over the world but the names given to the dishes can be very unique. This uniqueness in Translation Studies may lead to a case of untranslatability as it has no direct equivalence or no one-to-one equivalence known as non-equivalence. For this non-equivalence case Baker proposes 8 translation strategies under the name of translation strategy for non-equivalence at word level used by professional translators.  What strategies are used in translating the Indonesian dishes based on Baker’s taxonomy and what semantic components are involved in the English equivalences are the objectives of this research. Using a mixed method; descriptive, contrastive, qualitative methods, the phenomena found in the source novel and in the target novel are compared, then documented into a description just the way they are, then analyzed to be identified according to the objectives of the research. The results show that not all translation strategies are used in translating the Indonesian dishes in the novel and the semantic components involved in the English equivalences are mostly ingredients then followed by process, performance, and taste.