Some Kinds

of
Translation
Basic Translation Methods

Translation based on Language

Variants
No
.

The Variants

Example

Literature

prose, poets, plays, etc

Journalistic

essays, articles, etc

Newspaper

editorials, headlines, articles,

news, advertisements,
announcements, etc

Science

academic writings, scientific

writings, etc

Legal document

Birth certificate, marriage

certificate, law documents,
diplomatic documents, etc

As mentioned earlier .
Translation

is a process of changing texts

from one language (source language) to
another (target language) without changing the
content of the original texts

The

essential task that the translators bear is

to look for, in the source language, even the
smallest language units that can be translated
equally into the target language. These
smallest language units are called unit of
translation.

Translation based on Language

Hierarchy
1

Translation in Phoneme
Level
Phoneme the smallest unit of speech that

can be used to make one word different from

another word, but it does not bear meanings.

Phoneme

is divided into two

Vowels a, i, u, e, o
Consonants b, c, d, m, n, r, s, t, etc

The

role of phoneme is to differentiate

meanings from one word and the others
Example :
Indonesia kutu and kuku, buka and cuka

Translation

in phoneme level, in English to

Indonesian translation and vice versa, is
only used in spoken translation.
Example :
Diana English /daina/, Indonesian /diana/
Paris English /pris/, Indonesian /paris/
Edinburgh English /dinbr/, Indonesian
/edinburg/

Translation

in phoneme level in English to

Indonesian translation and vice versa
causes no difficulty because it is solely
related to how to write and/or speak whats
in the source language.

Translation in Morpheme Level

Morpheme

a word or a part of a word that has a meaning

and that contains no smaller part that has a
meaning
the smallest units of language that have
meanings
Example :
one-sided se-arah one-sided street
(jalan searah)
se-pihak one-sided agreement
(perjanijian sepihak)
One morpheme in source language has equal
translation in target language that the translators
have to pay attention to.

Some other examples :

auto - swa: autoactivity - swadaya
pre - pra : prehistory - prasejarah
bi - dwi : bilateral dwipihak
self - swa : self-sufficient swasembada
Note : Translation in morpheme level, as
in phoneme level, happens rarely.
Morpheme structures in source and
target language is usually not equally
translatable.

Translation in Word Level

Illustration :

Father
Ayah

lives
tinggal

Yesterday
Kemarin

Who told
you
Siapa mengatakan

in Surabaya
di Surabaya

he came
here
dia datang
kemari
this?
padamu hal ini?

In

the examples presented before, the

Indonesian translation used there is
determined by word level.

This

kind of translation is used more often

than the previous kinds of translation.

However,

translation based on word level is

limited. It is due to the fact that there are
limited numbers of word in sentences that
can be translated in word level.

In

addition, translation based on word level is

employed if the sentence structures used are
very simple.

Exercise
Translate these sentences using word
level translation.
1) Father died on May 2012
2) I will stop at that store tomorrow
3) I am bringing my hat
4) On Sunday, I went to the beach
5) Joe waited for the train
6) Nestor goes to the office early
7) The ice-cream melts quickly
8) The train was late 20 minutes
9) The singer bowed to the audience
10)Eddy plays basketball every Friday