Translation Strategies of Islamic Terms In Indonesian-English Research Papers

The study examined whether strategies employed in translating Islamic terms of the research papers from Indonesian into English distorted the intended messages. Translation strategies refer to ways of transferring messages or meaning from a source language (SL) into a target language (TL). The data of the study were Islamic terms of dissertation abstracts representing different themes taken randomly from the university repository. All data were qualitatively analyzed using the concepts of translation strategies relevant to the dissertation's abstracts as research papers. The study showed translators mostly used preservation, addition, globalization, and localization strategy. Preservation strategy is used by borrowing the source language terms for there was difficult to find the same terms in English as TL; and an addition strategy by using English terms with brief descriptive notes placed in the text. Globalization utilized TL generic words because they conveyed meaning commonly understood by readers; and localization employed deleting, changing, and adapting SL words' phonological components and graphic symbols. The analysis also indicated that the translation of Islamic terms of dissertation abstracts from Indonesian into English was dominantly influenced by foreignization-ideology. This led to produce certain meaning distortion in the TL that made readers misunderstand the intended messages.