The Translation Ability of The Second Semester Students in English Department, Gunadarma University ( A Descriptive Study )

Abstract

Gunadarma University encourages translation as the main subject in the Faculty of Letters. Some of the graduates are expected to be translators in the future since translation field is one of the field jobs that contribute much to the development of Indonesia. Therefore, this study focuses on finding out the ability of the students of Faculty of Letters of Gunadarma University in translating English text into Indonesian, the study was consisting of accuracy, clarity, naturalness, and intelligibility of the students’ translations. The population of the second semester students of Faculty of Letters in Kalimalang’s classes which consists of 90 students, and the samples consist of 36 students. To get the data from the sample, the writer gave a short story “ Baby Birds in Boxes “ by Parker Dorris, written in Winter 2008, the short story was taken in English language from onepagestories.com. The samples participant were asked to translate the short story into Indonesian, and after that all of the translated text were evaluated using inter-raters technique. The result of the study showed that the students ability in translation was categorized into fair. Due to the major result of the translated text had some literal translations, grammatical / idiom mistakes are not more than 25% of the whole text, and there is one or two unnatural or unclear terms.