THE STUDENTS’ CHALLENGES IN TRANSLATING IDIOMATIC EXPRESSIONS IN THE NOVEL ‘LASKAR PELANGI’: A DESCRIPTIVE STUDY OF TRANSLATION FROM INDONESIAN TEXT INTO ENGLISH

There are some problems commonly faced by a translator, one of them is culture. This problem usually emerges when translating literary works. So far, many of the researches mostly use texts in which English becomes the source language and only a few takes English as the target language. This research attempts to investigate the challenges in translating Indonesian text into English especially idiomatic expression. 20 juniors in tertiary level education got involved in this research. They were asked to translate a novel from Andrea Hirata entitled Laskar Pelangi . The investigation on the products of their translations revealed that the students encountered some problems concerning accuracy, readability and acceptability. The result from interview showed that the students difficulties arose from students’ lack of understanding of target language grammatical rules, and inability to find a target language equivalent are the main reasons of the student’s difficulties. So as to the strategies to deal with these difficulties, the students employed some strategies such as consulting dictionaries, paraphrasing, and using word-for-word and literal translation. Such strategies seemed to be in adequately cope with the cultural issue, so it is suggested that the students familiarize themselves with their own culture, and English culture by reading more books, and watching Indonesian as well as English series and films. Moreover, being familiar with the adopted strategies, the students can translate literary works more properly.


INTRODUCTION
Translation is rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text (Newmark, 1988). Translation has a very important role in crosscultural communication. To convey the message, a translator is required to have general knowledge of both the source language and the target language. Yet, it frequently happens that the translator failed to deliver the message properly. (Mathieu, 2003) elucidates the five common issues that appears in the translation world; they are Lexical-Semantic Problems, Grammatical Problems, Rhetorical Problems, Pragmatic Problems, and Cultural Issues.
Regarding translating the literary work, cultural issues become the main problem. (Bharathi, 2014) conducted a study concerning the problems in translating two novels "Tell a thousand lies and the Sea of innocence". The two novels themselves were created in the English language or the source language was English, and the target language was Urdu, which is one of the Indian languages. The study concluded that most English words were not translated properly into Indian because there was no close equivalent due to some cultural terminologies in English into the Indian language. Hence, he suggested to translators to have a proper insight of both the languages, i.e., the source language and the target language. In other words, the most common problems found in translating literary works were the cultural problems.
Inspired by the challenges in translation and Bharathi's work, the study tries to investigate the challenges in translating Indonesian's literary work especially in translating idiomatic expression. While, the researches in literary works translated the texts with the source language is English into any various target language, only a few discussed the translation from different kinds of language into English acted as target language. Therefore, the current research intends to find out the students' difficulties in translating the text from Indonesia into English especially the idiomatic expressions found in the novel entitled Laskar Pelangi. Further it also tried to uncover some strategies used by the English students to overcome those difficulties. This study seeks to answer the following question: 1. What are the difficulties faced by tertiary students in translating idiomatic expressions from Indonesian into English? 2. How do the students overcome those difficulties?

LITERATURE REVIEW Translation
Translation is basically to change the form of the source language into the form of the receptor (target) language. The form of language involves the actual words, phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, etc., which are oftenly referred as the language surface structure (Larson, 1984, as cited in (Rumahorbo, n.d.)).
To translate is to communicate the same meaning in a target language as well as in the source language. To sufficiently do such thing, translation should get through translation process as can be seen in the following figure.

Source Language
Target Language Figure 1. Overview of the translation process (Larson, 1998) The figure shows that in order to get proper meaning, a translator should have equal understanding of both source and target language. Another issue in translation has always been the method used in translation. (Newmark, 1988) offers several methods of translation and idiomatic translation belongs to the adaptation. In idiomatic translation, the original message is reproduced, but tends to alter the nuances of meaning by preferring colloquialisms and idioms where these do not exist in the original.
Concerning quality of translation, there are three main aspects that a translation is considered qualified, which are accuracy, clarity, and naturalness. The first aspect, accuracy, a translator may inadvertently omit some piece of information, or even adds more information which are not in the source text just to get across the meaning. The second aspect of translation quality is clarity or readibility. A translation may be accurate but can still not reach out to the people who use the target language. The third aspect of translation quality is naturalness or acceptability. A translation may be accurate where the translator correctly understands the source text, and it may even understandable by the target language readers, and yet the form may not be in the natural idiomatic forms of the target language. (In & Words, 1997) defines idioms as frozen patterns of language which allow little or no variation in form and often carry meanings which cannot be deduced from their individual components. It means that idioms are fixed expressions that have different meaning from each word involved. For example, bury the hatchet which means to become friendly again after a disagreement or a quarrel. In Indonesia, it translates to berdamai, rather than mengubur kampak itu.

Idiomatic Expression
In addition, (In & Words, 1997) identifies the restrictions of idiom grammatical and syntactic aspect. According to her, a speaker or a writer cannot normally do any of the following with an idiom: 1. Changing the word order of an idiom. For example, "the short and the long of it", where it should be "the long and the short of it". 2. Adding any word to an idiomatic expression. For example, the very long and the short of it. 3. Deleting a word from an idiom, such as deleting the article 'the' from the expressions "spill the beans" would change totally their meanings. Hence, 'spill beans' have no idiomatic sense. 4. Replacing a word in an idiom with another word even if those words are synonyms.
For example, "the long and short of it" means the basic facts of a situation. The adjective 'long' cannot be substituted by another adjective, like tall, despite having nearly the same meaning. 5. Modifying the grammatical structure of an idiom, as it will lead to the destruction of the idiom's meaning. For instance, the expression "stock and barrel lock" is no more idiomatic because of the order of the items is changed in the expression "lock, stock and barrel" completely. Another example is when modifying an idiom into passive form, such as in the expression "they spilled the beans" which means "they reveal a surprise" into "some beans were spilled", it will conjure a different meaning from its active form. 6. In addition, inserting the comparative form '-er' to the adjective 'hot' in the expression "being in hot water" changes the common sense of the idiom which has the meaning of 'being in trouble'.
A translator should take all these restrictions into consideration since they influence the degree of lexical items' idiomaticity, and their main feature of figurativeness may be removed.  (In & Words, 1997) states that there are the following four main difficulties involved in translating idiomatic expressions: a. The target language may have no equivalent of the idiom or fixed expression involved. b. The target language may have a similar counterpart with the idiom or fixed expression involved, but its context of use may be different; the two expressions may have different connotations, for instance, or they may not be pragmatically transferable. c. When the source language idiom is used in both its literal and idiomatic meaning at the same time, the use of idiom cannot be successfully translated in the target text unless the target-language idiom also corresponds to the source-language idiom both in form and in meaning.

Strategies Used in Translating Idioms
In addition to the difficulties in translating idioms, (In & Words, 1997) also declares four problem-solving strategies to overcome such probable difficulties which are as follows: 1. Using an idiom of similar meaning and form. This strategy involves using an idiom in target language which conveys roughly the same meaning as that of the sourcelanguage idiom. 2. Using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form. 3. Translation by paraphrase. When there is no similar idioms in the target language, the most common way of translating idioms is to use paraphrase strategy. 4. Translation by omission. An idiom may sometimes be omitted altogether in the target text, as with single words. This may be because there is no close match in the target language, its meaning cannot be easily paraphrased, or for stylistic reasons.

Review of the Previous Studies
A study conducted by (Rumahorbo, n.d.) entitled The Students' Mastery In Translating Indonesian Idiomatic Expression To English By Using Equivalence Translation. His study aimed to investigate the students' ability in translating Indonesian idiomatic expression to English by using equivalence translation, and whether the use of equivalence translation give significant effect on the students' mastery in translating Indonesian idiomatic expression to English. The findings showed that 57% of the students are able to translate idioms using equivalence translation, while 43% of them were unable to. It showed that the students were able to translate Indonesian proverbs into English by using Equivalence translation. In addition, a study by Sari, Antoni, & Eripuddin (2016) cited in (Sharifudin, 2019) investigated students' difficulties in translation through analysing the students' translation quality such as Accuracy, Acceptability, and Readability. They conclude that the students' faced some difficulties in translation such as their lack of vocabulary and grammar. Some of them had difficulties with unfamiliar words, some of them were unable in determining the meaning well and lacking in knowledge of target language structure and a handful of them had difficulties in arranging the words and putting a good sentence. The previous studies above give some useful insight to this research about students' difficulties and strategies in translating Indonesian idiomatic expressions found in a novel entitled Laskar Pelangi into English, and further the strategies employed by the students to overcome the difficulties during the translating process.

METHOD
This research aims at exploring translation difficulties faced by students and their strategy in overcoming them. To attain the purpose this research employed the descriptive study.
In exploring translation, the study provided insights into the case of students' difficulties in translating idiomatic expressions from Indonesia into English, so descriptive method was sufficient and appropriate to use.
This study was conducted at a higher education institution in Cimahi in October 2018. The seventh semester students were chosen for this study mainly because the translation test contains idiomatic expressions that cannot be translated literally. The seventh semester students can be considered to have adequate knowledge and skill in translation as they have already studied the principals of translation and English-Indonesian translation in the fifth and sixth semesters respectively, and they are currently studying the Indonesian-English translation in the seventh semester. There were approximately 40 students. However, his research chose 20 students in order not to take up too much time and energy than intended.
To obtain the data, this research used two techniques of data collection, namely test and interview. The test was used as the tool of research in order to investigate the students' difficulties in translating idioms as well as the strategies employed by the students in relation to the theory used in this research. The test consisted of twenty Indonesian sentences containing at least one idiomatic expression. The sentences were picked from the novel entitled Laskar Pelangi. The students were required to translate the sentences using free translation.
The second instrument in collecting the data was interview. The interview included informal open-ended questions. The students were asked two questions. The first question dealt with the difficulties encountered by the students when they were in the process of translating the sentences. The second dealt with the strategies employed by the students to overcome those difficulties. The students' answers are described and discussed in detail.
The test result was analyzed using Nababan's (2011) theory as cited in (Sharifudin, 2019) which makes use 3 indicators (1, 2, 3) consisting of 3 items (accuracy, acceptability, & readibility), where each item gets a maximum score of 3 and a minimum score of 1. Each of these three indicators was measured by some indicators. For example, in accuracy, there are 3 indicators such as accurate, less accurate, and inaccurate. The three indicators of translation quality assessment can be seen below: Then, score of each students' translation quality will be combined and then divided by three. Later the result will be categorized into 3 category of translation quality (very good, average, & poor). The interview as a validity check was recorded and then analyzed using transcript analysis. The recording was transcribed one by one and examined in terms of the points being investigated. They were the difficulties and the strategies faced and employed by each of the students respectively.

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Findings of students' performance in the English translation test presented in Table 3 below: Based on the result of the test, it is shown that majority of the students' translation were in Average category with the score ranged from 55.56 % -66.67 %. It can be seen from Very Good category which were just 1 student, 3 students were in Poor Category, and 16 students were in Average category. In addition, there are 4 students who were inaccurate in their translation and 16 of them were less accurate in accuracy aspect. In acceptability aspect, there were 10 students who were unacceptable in their translation, and 10 students were less acceptable. Lastly in readability aspect, there were 3 students who were unreadable in their translation, 16 students were less readable and only 1 of them who were readable in their translation. Since the students did not fulfill yet three aspects quality assessment of translation by Nababan, therefore, it can be concluded that the students had some difficulties when translating idiomatic expressions from Indonesian to English. For each of the students' individual scores of their translation test, they can be viewed in the Appendix.
The following is the sample of accurate, acceptable, and readable translation from the test: From table 4, we can see that students successfully conveyed the meaning of the source text into the target text. The translation also sounded natural and suitable with the grammar structure of the target language. There are some minor mistakes, such as incorrect use of verb 'be', but it does not hamper the meaning of the text.
For students' inaccurate, unacceptable, and unreadable translation, some examples can be seen in the following tables: In table 6, it is clearly shown that the content of the source text was not perfectly conveyed or not conveyed at all due to major mistakes in grammatical structure and word choices. The translation could also not be understood by the reader.
Based on the data, it was found out that most students used incorrect word choice due to negative transfer from their mother tongue. Consequently, the meaning of the sentence in the target language is different from the source language (see example 1 and 2).
Example (1): ... throw away the toilet as they please Source text : ... buang hajat sesuka hatinya Correction: ... defecated as they please Example (2): He incised the red thread of simple truth of life ... Source text: Beliau menorehkan benang merah kebenaran hidup yang sederhana ... Correction: He brought the very essence of the simple life's righteousness In English, some words are often used together in a way that sounds correct or called as collocation. Unfortunately, this rule cannot be found in Indonesian. Some students tend to translate word-by-word based on what they found in Indonesian-English dictionary without considering whether it is appropriate or not. In example (1), the student translated buang hajat into throw away the toilet instead of defecate. If the expression throws away the toilet is back-translated to Indonesia, it means melempar jauh -jauh toilet, which is far from the intended meaning of the source text. Thus, the appropriate word should be defecated. In example (2), the student incorrectly translated the phrase benang merah into the red thread. Indeed, the read thread is the correct translation for benang merah if translated literally. In this context, however, benang merah is an idiom or a fixed expression that means a very essence or a connected line of something abstract, such as the truth of life. In this sentence, the appropriate phrase should be the very essence instead of simply translated into the red thread. The same can be said to the first example, where the students translated the word buang hajat wordfor-word into throw away the toilet that makes the translation inaccurate.  (3), the student used the simple present verb of smile instead of simple past tense smiled. Keep in mind that these sentences were taken from a novel, which the story occurred in the past, hence past tense were mostly used in the novel. Therefore, the appropriate form of verb tense for this translation should be smiled. Example (4) was also incorrect because the students used the simple present verb of enjoy instead of simple past verb enjoyed. Clearly, it showed that the students have limited knowledge about how to use the correct verb tense in the sentence. The students repeatedly made errors in the use of correct verb tense in their translation that would cause the sentence to be grammatically wrong and less acceptable.
Some of the students' translation were difficult to understand since the message was unclear. The examples are: Example (5): He impress such as satisfied man will bitterly struggle and life in a muddle Source text: Ia mengesankan sebagai pria kenyang akan pahit getir perjuangan dan kesusahan hidup Correction: His demeanor was that of a man who had been through life's bitter difficulties Example (6): As a result, they to bring home only the body crushed Source text: Akibatnya, yang berhasil mereka bawa pulang hanya tubuh yang remuk redam... Correction: Consequently, all they managed to bring home was bruised and battered bodies... As seen in these examples, the students still encountered some problems in making a correct sentence. The sentences were grammatically incorrect and the messages were unclear. It might be the result of word-for-word translation done by the students. They tended to transfer their mother language structure into the target language that will cause grammatical errors and inaccurate, unacceptable, and unreadable sentences.
In summary, the students faced many difficulties when translating Indonesian idiomatic expression sentences into English. The most frequent ones were incorrect word choice, followed by incorrect use of articles, word form, and preposition, dependent clause, modals, and grammar structure in general, including missing fragment and unclear sentences.
From interview, it was found out that students encountered difficulties in translating idiomatic expressions. The participants' answers are summarized as follows: 1. Unfamiliarity with the source language idiomatic expressions is the major difficulty for the students. A participant has this to say: "Bahasanya (kata -katanya) susah karena diambil dari novel, jadi seperti bahasa syair -syair gitu. Jadi bahasanya banyak yang tidak saya ketahui".
2. Some of the participants understand the meaning of the idiomatic expression but are unable to express its meaning in their own language. A participant highlighted this by saying: "Sebenarnya kita tuh tahu intinya dari kata itu, cuma karena ini bahasanya bahasa sastra, jadi rumit gitu. Padahal kalau diartikan, saya mengerti maksudnya" 3. The meaning of the idiomatic expression cannot be comprehended from the words within the text individually. A participant pointed this out by saying: "I found many words that I never know. I mean, di situ benar -benar sastra katakatanya, karena memang mungkin diambil dari novel. To overcome all the difficulties, students employed a wide array of strategies. The students restate the meaning of idioms by changing the form of the source language idioms into nonidiomatic expressions in the target language text. The example for this strategy can be seen below: Example (7): He believe that having a discussion about something he didn't know would only show his stupidness Source text: Dia paham bahwa berpolemik secara membabi buta tentang sesuatu yang tak ia kuasai hanya akan memperlihatkan ketololannya sendiri Correction: He realized that blindly engaging in polemics about something he hadn't mastered would make his own stupidity known In translating this Indonesian idiom "membabi buta" into English, the students used paraphrasing strategy. In this case, the students cannot find any form of idiomatic expressions in English that has a similar meaning with the Indonesia idiom "membabi buta", so that in translating this idiom, the student just paraphrased them and used an English non-idiomatic expression "something he didn't know" to convey the meaning of this Indonesian idiom into the Target language text. This use of strategy, according to the students in the interview, was caused by their lack of vocabulary and choice of words when translating the text, especially the idiomatic expressions found in the text.
Besides paraphrasing, the rest of the text translated by the students was not successfully conveyed in the target language by the students. This is due to the use of word-for-word and literal translation strategy by the students. the example can be seen below: Example (8): He carved red yarn the truth life simple Source text: Beliau menorehkan benang merah kebenaran hidup yang sederhana Correction: He brought the very essence of the simple life's righteousness In this example, it is clear that the meaning of the sentence itself is not conveyed at all, let alone the idiom "benang merahí". If one looks into a dictionary, idiom benang merah means the underlying or the very essence of something that is connected through series of events or in this case, the series of truth in life. To conclude, the strategies that the students used in dealing with difficulties in translating idioms is to translate the idiomatic expressions through paraphrase. Word-forword and literal translation strategy are also used by the students that, unfortunately, makes the meaning of the text is not conveyed successfully.
In addition, students also use some solutions to solve their problems. The interviewed students provided the following solutions: 1. Students should use specialized dictionaries such as Oxford, Merriam Webster, and not just Google translate. Almost all participants highlighted this strategy by saying: "Strateginya kita memakai kamus online. Tapi tidak akan cukup kalau dengan kamus online saja, kita harus bisa mencocokkan arti si kata itu di kamus ini dan di kamus lainnya seperti Oxford atau Merriam Webster" 2. Students must be exposed more to source and target language literature such as books, movies, songs, etc.. A participant implied this strategy by saying: "Karena saya jarang membaca apa -apapun itu termasuk novel, I found many words that I never know." 3. Students should avoid literal translation that results in most cases in wrong or poor translation. Another participant also implied this strategy by saying: "Strateginya, paling dibikin paraphrase. Misalnya di google translate, kalau ada kata -kata yang kurang tepat, kita ganti sendiri. Oh kira -kira yang pantasnya apa. Contohnya seperti kata cold hand, kan itu artinya bukan tangan dingin,kata itu artinya lain lagi" The findings of this research showed that the students indeed encountered the abovementioned difficulties, with the most occurences of difficulties came from incorrect word choice, followed by incorrect use of verb tense, dependent clause, article, word form, missing fragment and incorrect modals, unclear sentences, incorrect grammar structure, awkward word order, incorrect use of preposition, subject -verb agreement, verb form, singular/plural nouns, and the fewest difficulties came from missing connecting word.
In addition, it has been shown that inability to find a target language equivalent becomes a major difficulty for the students since they used word-for-word and literal translation that affect the meaning of the source language sentences. This result is in line with Nida and Taber (1982, p.12), who state that "Translation consists in reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalence of the source language (SL) message firstly, in terms of meaning and secondly, in terms of style", Moreover, results of the translation test show that deciding which translation strategy is appropriate constitutes another challenge for the students. They tend to translate literally without giving any explanation or footnote which result in nonsense expressions as shown in the example "buang hajat", which means defecate in English, while the students ttranslate it literally into "throw away the toilet". Others use Google translation or depend on guessing the meaning through the individuak words of the expression. This result agrees with the findings of the study conducted by Meryem (2009) about the type of difficulty the students of Master 1 (M1) faced while translating idioms and she tries to suggest solutions and identify strategies that may help to limit or avoid these difficulties. She states that students do not use the accurate strategies that may help to achieve appropriate guesses. The results also indicate that the students can be helped to deal with idiomatic expression properly by being familiar with the adopted strategies in translating idiomatic expressions. Moreover, the findings also indicate that being aware of how to use translation strategies and techniques can ease the task of translators and students (Newmark,1981: Larson, 1984: Baker, 1992.

CONCLUSION
The purpose of this research is to investigate tertiary student's difficulties in translating idiomatic expressions from Indonesia into English and their strategy in dealing with said difficulties. Along the way, this research also explores the students' translation quality. The findings of the study from the test showed that, the students have the difficulties mostly in word choice, followed by word form, the use of article, and preposition, the use of dependent clause, modals, sentence structure, and word order, sentence fragment and sentence clarity. Moreover, the analysis of the students' interviews indicated that the unfamiliarity with the source language text, the lack of understanding of target language grammatical rules, and inability to find a target language equivalent are the main reasons of the student's difficulties.
To deal with these difficulties, the students employed some strategies such as consulting dictionaries, -e ither online or in book form, translating by paraphrase, and using word-for-word and literal translation. In addition, the participants of the research agree that familiarizing themselves with their own culture, and English culture by reading more books, and watching Indonesian as well as English series and films. Moreover, being familiar with the adopted strategies may enhance students' abilities to translate more properly.