Domestication Strategy in the English Target Novel the Red Bekisar

Abstract

This research article is about the translation of culture-specific items or cultural words from Indonesian into English. It focuses on the Domestication strategy and the procedures of oblique translation applied in the translation. The data source is an Indonesian novel entitled Bekisar Merah, which is translated into English, the Red Bekisar. The novel involves the Javanese cultural background, where Islam religion becomes one of the influential settings. This research was conducted with a qualitative-descriptive approach by adapting the concept of oblique translation from Vinay and Darbelnet, the domestication strategy by Venuti, and the culture-specific items by Newmark. The objectives are to reveal the type of cultural words that are domesticated and to locate the procedures of oblique translation applied in translating the cultural words. The results show that the cultural words which are translated with the domestication strategy are of two kinds: material culture and organizations, customs, and ideas; from 61 data on domestication strategy, all four procedures are identified: transposition, modulation, adaptation, and equivalence; and the most frequent procedure found is modulation.