DEVELOPING STUDENTS' TRANSLATION COMPETENCE AT TERTIARY EDUCATION LEVEL

Abstract

Developing students‘ translation competence is the main concern in translation
education context. Translation competence is not simply understood as linguistic
competence, in which changing the language from a source text into the target
text is considered as the core of translation activity. Indeed, translation
competence consists of several interrelated sub competences. This paper is aimed
at discussing students‘ transllation problems in translation and how to develop
their translation competencein a tertiary education level context. This is a
descriptive qualitative research which is aimed at understanding students‘
linguistic and cultural problems which reflect their translation competence. The
data of this research consists of students‘ translation work and students‘
responses to the questionnaires and interviews. Students are asked to translate an
English text into Indonesian. A set of questionnaires are also used to assess
students‘ problems during translation and how they dealt with their translation
problems. The results show that most of the students have problems with both
languages and how to deal with cultural problems. In terms of linguistic level,
students‘ problems varies from lecical problem, grammatical problems and
syntactic problems. Furher, students‘ cultural problems in translation mainly
related to difficulties in translating culture related terms from English into
Indonesian. The cultural related terms found in the source language text which
include food and drink references and relationship terms were not appropriately
translated into Indonesian. The students‘ linguistic and extralinguistic problems
show that they may understand that translation is merely a linguistic activity
wihtout considering the importance of cultural understanding. These linguistic
and extralinguisic problems also indicates that extralinguistic and linguistic
problems often go together. These problems also reflect unsatisfying level of
students‘ translation competence which, in turn needs to be addressed in
translation curriculum so that students‘ translation competence willl develop well.
Keywords: develop, student, translation, competence, education