This thesis investigates the concept of naturalness of the translated sentences in the eyes of the native and the non-native speakers of English taking part in this study. It also seeks to ascertain whether the use of modal auxiliaries is open to interpretation. The latter aim serves as a response to the ubiquitous use of modal auxiliaries in legal documents. However, due to lack of access to the native speakers of English working as lawyers in Indonesia and to English teachers with legal background, the writer decided to rely on English teachers? well-informed judgement on the use of modal auxiliaries in the translated sentences.
With this end in view, the writer utilized three versions of agreement entitled Perjanjian Pemeliharaan Peralatan translated from Indonesian to English by first analyzing the corrections made by the raters and providing justifications for the alternatives proposed by the raters. The writer continued to identify whether the modals found in each version of the TT result in meanings that are identical to, stronger, or weaker than those in the ST. In order to arrive at the accurate meaning of each modal, the writer first consulted A Comprehensive Indonesian-English Dictionary by Stevens and Schmidgall-Tellings (2010) followed by looking up Online Cambridge Dictionary for the translations of the modals into English. The writer then categorized each modal into deontic, epistemic, or dynamic by referring to Huddleston & Pullum (2007: 53-58) and Biber et al (2007: 485-486).
The findings of this study revealed that both the native speakers and the non-native speakers determined the naturalness of the translated sentences based on their grammatical accuracy. The majority of corrections they made belong to function words such as auxiliaries, conjunctions, prepositions, subordinators rather than to lexical words such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The results also supported the writer?s hypothesis that in spite of the raters? familiarity with the use of modality, the “prone-to-misinterpretation” nature of modal auxiliaries still remains. That is to say that certain modals are not always understood identically. As a matter of fact, they can distort the meaning. |