ABSTRACT

Islami, Ridho, M. 2023. Students’ Difficulties in Translating an Explanation Text from English to Indonesian. English Language Education Study Program, Faculty of Teachers’ Training and Education, Lambung Mangkurat University, Banjarmasin. The first advisor: Elvina Arapah, M.pd., the second advisor: Yusuf al Arief, M.Hum

Keywords: translation, students's difficulties, explantion text

The ability in translating is very important in order to gain new knowledge and aide communication, as it is one of the way to connect with people all around the world. Translating is no easy feat, especially for beginner, even most of university students from English Language Education Program faculty face a lot of problems in translating the English language. Thus, the resesearcher wants to describe what are the students’ difficulties in translating an explanation text from English to Indonesia. The researcher chooses students from ELESP batch 2019. This research conducted at the English Language, Faculty of Teaching Training and Education, University of Lambung Mangkurat.

This research used descriptive quantitative technique. The data were obtained from the questionnaire and analysized quantitatively. The participants of this research were students of English Language Education Study Program batch 2019. 

The results of research showed that the students’ difficulties in translating explanation text were lexical and stylistic difficulties. In lexical difficulty, the students were difficult to understand the meaning of a word or expression that were unable to be found in the standart dictionary and in target language, to understand the meaning of a word or an expression in specific text topic such as historical, science, biology, chemistry, to translate noun form and verb form, to differentiate morpheme system, to translate the long and complex sentence, to arrange the text in target language, and to translate unusual or informal words. Meanwhile,  in stylistic difficulties, the students were difficult to translate metaphoric utterances, idiomatic expressions, personification, illocutionary verbs, parafrase and alliteration from its original language. 

Those difficulties were caused by long or complex structure of the text, idioms, personification, the words with multiple meaning and the unlisted meaning of the word in dictionary. In conclusion, most students had more difficulties in lexical difficulty while the difficulty in stylistic aspect rarely occurred.