Legal language - that is the language used for communication in legal affairs – is renowned for its register, culture and system-bound nature. Translating legal texts written in English into Indonesian is especially difficult as, on the one hand, translators or anyone involved in legal translation will need to recognize special characteristics of various legal terms, and be competent in the rules and conventions when rendering them into the receptor language. On the other hand, a legal translator is supposed to produce accurate, clear, and natural translations.
One component of that legal language is the commonly-used abstract noun in legal texts. It is common knowledge that translated legal texts are generally difficult to understand due to reasons to be discussed in this study.
This study is designed to explore the problems related to translating English legal texts into Indonesian, particularly the strategies of dealing with abstract nouns, and ways of solving the problems effectively, by which Indonesian-translated legal texts are expected to be more natural and much easier to understand.
The main difficulty in translating legal texts in general and in understanding the translated legal texts, as this study concludes, relates to the translator's inadequate knowledge of the source language and the target language. As abstract nouns frequently occur in legal texts, the subsidiary problems in legal translation include the translator's competence in translating them accurately, his/her ability in dealing with the translation of sentences containing abstract nouns and finding the closest equivalents of each abstract noun according to equivalence theories.
The theories of Nida and Taber (1969) and Larson (1984), respectively on kernels and propositions by which the sentences need to be analyzed before they are translated, are the most relevant to this study in order to produce an accurate, clear, and natural translation.
This study shows the frequency of occurrences of nouns including abstract nouns used in legal texts, which is substantial to be accounted tor by a legal translator. Other findings, based on the analysis, include the translator's unawareness of the rules and conventions of Indonesian affixation, and of the various ways in rendering English abstract nouns into Indonesian. |