Excessive Lexical Borrowing

Restraining the Absorption of English Vocabulary into Indonesian through

Translation

Mirsa Umiyati

and Ida Bagus Putra Yadnya

Universitas Warmadewa, Bali, Indonesia

Udayana University, Bali, Indonesia

mirsa.umiyati2@gmail.com, putrayadnya@yahoo.com

Keywords: Lexical borrowing, absorption of English vocabulary, translation.

Abstract: The presence of the national language (Indonesian) among the regional languages in this country and the need

for mastery of foreign languages (especially English) indicates the occurrence of language contact,

competition or conflicts that, to some extent, led to the situation of interplay between languages.The effect of

foreign languages, especially English has become a real dilemma because, on the one hand, it provides an

opportunity for Indonesian to evolve towards a modern language capable of bearing the vehicular load to

express all aspects of life. On the other hand, however, the uncontrolled lexical borrowing conducted

independently without reference to a general guideline will be a boomerang for Indonesian. The adaptation

shows that there has been additions of new words derived from foreign vocabulary but due to the frequent

use, over time become Indonesian vocabulary. Unfortunately there are a lot of loan words seem to be excessive

and unnecessary for Indonesian has certain lexical items to express the same meaning. And translation, in

addition to adaptation, could be used to restrain this excessive measure so that the borrowing does not impact

negatively on the development and preservation of both national and regional languages.

1 INTRODUCTION

The Indonesian language is bound to grow under the

influence of the plurality of local and foreign

languages. Foreign language imposing a very

significant influence these days is English as an

international language. The presence of foreign

languages, Indonesian and local languages within

Indonesian society indicate an interaction between

languages. And this linguistic phenomenon manifests

itself as a mutual influence of language interplay and

language conflict or competition. This is also

indicated by Hardini and Grange (2017) that “when

two languages come into contact, they exert a

reciprocal influence, often unbalanced. A

phenomenon that often occurs in case of language

contact is the absorption or borrowing of lexical

elements, which will enrich the vocabulary of the

receiving language.”

Most languages in the world are inevitably

influenced by other languages. Indonesian also

experienced the same thing. In the Indonesian

context, these effects mainly come from nations that

once colonized the country and the nations that had

traded with the inhabitants of the land. In its

development, the Indonesian language historically

has been colored by the absorption of a variety of

foreign language elements such as Sanskrit, Tamil

and Hindi, Chinese, Arabic, Portuguese, Dutch, until

the most prominent language today, i.e English.

Contact between languages through translation also

allows the enrichment of terms of different disciplines

in a language since the application of a number of

translation procedure such as borrowing (Vinay and

Dalbernet, 2000), transference and naturalization

(Newmark, 1988) and also pure borrowing and

naturalized borrowing (Molina and Albir, 2002) gave

rise to the term adoption and adaptation from the

source language into the target language.The

adoption of the elements of foreign language into the

national language is meant to improve the ability of

the national language (Indonesia) to bear the

vehicular load as a lingua franca in the development

of science, technology and art.

The foreign language that has very significantly

influenced Indonesian is English as an international

language. On the one hand, English has brought

Umiyati, M. and Yadnya, I.

Excessive Lexical Borrowing - Restraining the Absorption of English Vocabulary into Indonesian through Translation.

DOI: 10.5220/0007161000050008

In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference

on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education (CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017) - Literacy, Culture, and Technology in Language Pedagogy and Use, pages 5-8

ISBN: 978-989-758-332-2

positive influence on Indonesian because it can

increase the repertoire of Indonesian vocabulary itself

so that Indonesian could further develops due to the

demands of time (globalization). But on the other

hand the uncontrolled absorption and use of foreign

languages can lead the good and right use of

Indonesian into a mess. This is evident from the

frequent unnecessary code switching, creation of

language combinations and even code mixing. To

some extent the pragmatic attitude of speakers in their

speech activities voluntarily or involuntarily indicate

excessive borrowing. The high tendency of

borrowing either pure or naturalized from English in

the Indonesian vocabulary is very interesting to study

for this sociolinguistic phenomenon can significantly

contribute to describe how foreign terms are adopted

into Indonesian. This article tries to discuss the

excessive borrowing of English words in practice to

find an alternative use of the language and how to

control the absorption so it does not impact negatively

on the development and preservation of both national

and regional languages in the future In particular, this

study aimed to (1) identify and describe the profile of

borrowing and (2) provide alternative strategy of

absorption of foreign elements through translation to

restrain excessive lexical borrowing.

2 METHOD

This study is based on the philosophy of

phenomenological qualitative approach. The corpus

of data in this study is in the form of words or

expressions derived from English used in the mass

media based on personal observation through

television and the surrounding community as well as

the newspaper with the consideration that the

language used in the mass media has a powerful

magical power in influencing and shaping opinions of

the speaking communities. In other words, through

the mass media the attitude of language use in the

speech community can be reflected and established.

The collected data were further analyzed by

descriptive qualitative method.The analysis was done

by relying on the sociolinguistic theory especially

about borrowing and loanwords and theory of

translation, especially the translation procedure.

Since the analysis was done qualitatively, the result

of analysis is presented in descriptive narrative

manner supported by inductive and deductive

techniques.

3 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 The category and domain of

borrowed Indonesian vocabulary

Language change is normally tracked in the field of

vocabulary. Lexical borrowing appears on the surface

as lexical adoption and adaptation with adjustment. In

this study the enrichment of national language

vocabulary through such borrowing can be viewed

from various angles, including (1) the category of

borrowed Indonesian vocabulary, (2) the lexical

borrowing based on the field / domain, and (3)

translation as an alternative to control the uptake of

English in the repertoire of vocabulary enrichment

and improvement.

Linguistically, the borrowings are identified in

various categories including Noun, Verb, Adjective,

and Adverb. However, most of the data indicate that

the words adopted into the repertoire of Indonesian

are classified as noun. As far as the data available a

conclusion could be made in relation to the profile of

lexical borrowings from English into Indonesian

including (1) pure borrowing or direct borrowing

(such as: snack, coffee break, proposal, and

complicated) in daily communication; (2) borrowing

with the adaptation of spelling and pronunciation

(such as camera/ˈkæmərə/ → kamera /kamera/); (3)

the adaptation of spelling without adaptation of

pronunciation (design/dɪˈzaɪn/ → desain /desain/);

and (4) the adaptation of pronunciation without

adaptation of spelling (bias /baɪəs/ → bias/bias/)

Viewed from the field or domain perspective, the

data showed that the borrowing from the English

language can be grouped into various areas including

(1) the domain of property like apartemen (derived

from Apartment) and kondominium (from

condominium), (2) tourism sector such as akomodasi

(from accommodation), vila (from villa),and hotel,

(3) communication and transportation transportasi

and infrastuktur (4) sports like turnamen and liga

(from league), (5) politics such as republic,

demokrasi, and legislatif, (6) law such as naturalisasi

and konvensi, (7) economics like investasi,

manajemen, and korporasi, (8) education such as

edukasi ,kampus and evaluasi, (9) environment like

ekologi and polusi (10) health / medicine suchas

diagnose, kanker

, and kolesterol (11) social

community like komunitas and grup, (12) arts and

entertainment like the words artis, fiksi, and royalty.

Translating words or foreign terms has several

advantages. Besides enriching the Indonesian

vocabulary with synonyms, translation also increases

the expressing power of the Indonesian. However,

CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology

Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education

prior to absorption through translation it should be

examined whether the adopted vocabulary into

Indonesian language has nothing in common with the

meaning of the Indonesian words. Otherwise,

unnecessary or excessive borrowing can lead to the

occurrence of competing words in its use. There are a

lot of words permeated into the repertoire of

Indonesian that have actually existed originally in

Indonesian as seen in the following data:

Table 1: Competing words resulting from excessive

borrowing.

Lexical

Category

Borrowed

Indonesian

Vocabulary

Derived from

the English

Vocabulary

Original

Indonesian

Vocabulary

Noun

ksen Accent

oga

ecade Decade dasawarsa

ktivitas Activity

egiatan

Edukasi Education

endidikan

Eksistensi Existence keberadaan

igure Figure Tokoh

dentitas Identity

atidiri

apabilitas Capability kemampuan

Opsi Option

ilihan

Servis Service layanan

Verb

espek Respec

menghargai

mendistribusikan to distribute

embagikan

idesain Designed

irancang

eraksi to act

ertindak

Mentransfe

to transfe

Pengalihan

emonito

to monito

emantau

dikategorikan Categorized

igolongkan

mengevakuasi to evacuate

engungsikan

mengaplikasikan to apply

enerapkan

engetes to tes

enguji

Adjective

ktif Active Gia

armonis Harmonious

ukun

elative Relative Nisbi

Otentik Otentic

sli

oya

Loyal Setia

Tempore

Temporary Sementara

istoris Historic

ersejarah

mplisi

Implisite Tersira

alem Calm Tenang

Sensitive Sensitive Peka

All the above borrowed Indonesian vocabulary

are considered unnecessary since Indonesian

language has equivalent words to express the same

meaning or concept. The enrichment of vocabulary

can be tolerated when an equivalence of foreign word

does not exist in Indonesian vocabulary. The use of

borrowed vocabulary that already has equivalent in

the Indonesian language is often heard or seen to

some extent motivated by various reasons including

prestige, individual, and collective needs to enrich the

potential of vernacular.

3.2 Translation as an alternative

measure to restrain excessive

borrowing

Conceptually absorption of lexical terms contains the

notion of translation because in the process of

absorption translation occurs, that is to say,

transferring meaning of the source language to the

target language. From the perspective of translation

the model of absorption is determined by the strategy

of translating words or terms of the source language

(English) into the target language (Indonesia). The

definition of strategy in this paper is identical with the

understanding of the methods used Vinay and

Darbelnet (in Venuti (ed.), 2000: 84 93), the

procedure by Newmark (1988: 68 93), and adjustment

by Nida (1964) and Larson (1998), which is a way of

achieving equivalence between the source text and the

target text.There are many alternative strategies to

address the problem of a mismatch (non-equivalence)

in the translation process. Various matching strategies

have been proposed by various experts. Vinay and

Darbelnet (in Venuti, 2000: 84 93) for example, saw

a lot of alternatives matching and categorize into two

broad categories: (1) direct translation and (2) oblique

translation, which consist of seven different strategies

3.3 Direct Translation

Direct translation appears formally and semantically

in the form of borrowing resulting in intact adoption

and literal equivalent such as the English word menu

is also the same in the Indonesian language menu.

Baker (1991: 36) calls it a loan word that is applied to

lexical item having culture-specific meaning and

modern concepts. The number of new Indonesian

vocabulary through borrowing strategy is relatively

large including, for example, formal equivalent to

English word formal, the Indonesian borrowed word

editor derived from the English word editor. The new

Indonesian vocabulary through literal translation, ie

the transfer of direct source text into equivalent target

text grammatically and idiomatically (See Vinay and

Darbelnet in Venuti (2000: 86 88) includes cottage

equivalent to pondok, developer → pengembang,

gate→ pintu, gerbang, air port→bandar udara; joint

ventura→usaha patungan, show unit → unit contoh,

direct free kick →tendangan bebas langsung, etc.

3.4 Oblique translation

Oblique translation is a strategy that is oriented to the

target language or the impact of translation by

Excessive Lexical Borrowing - Restraining the Absorption of English Vocabulary into Indonesian through Translation

descriptive equivalent that is an explication, the

translation that is done by providing a description and

sometimes combined with functionality (Newmark,

1988: 83 84)such as the English expresion kick off

translated into tendangan awal pemain; check out Æ

Lapor keluar hotel; Shoreline Æ Garis pantai; left

winger Æ Pemain sayap kiri ; FairwayÆ Alur

pelayaran, and goal getter

Pencetak gol terbanyak.

4 CONCLUSION

From the overall discussion and analysis it can be

emphasized that the effect of English has become a

real dilemma because, on the one hand, it has made

Indonesian possible to evolve towards a modern

language capable of bearing the vehicular load to

express all aspects of life. On the other hand, the

excessive lexical borrowing conducted independently

without reference to a general guideline will be a

boomerang for Indonesian and unnecessary for

Indonesian has certain lexical items to express the

same meaning. Translation, in addition to adaptation,

could be used to restrain this excessive measure so

that the borrowing does not impact negatively on the

development and preservation of both national and

regional languages. The translation process as far as

possible should try to preserve the authenticity of its

linguistic characteristics, When the perfect formal

correspondence can not be achieved an innovation to

create a new term should be taken into consideration.

REFERENCES

Baker, Mona. 1991. In Other Words: A Coursebook on

Translation. London and New York: Routledge.

Djajasudarma, T.F., 1993. Metode Linguistik: Ancangan

Metode Penelitian dan Kajian, 2

ed. Bandung: Eresco

p. 1-2.

Hardini, Tri Indri and Philippe Grangé 2017, An Overview

of Indonesian Lianwords from French. Indonesian

Journal of Applied Linguistics, Vol. 6 No. 1, July 2016,

pp. 156-171.

Larson, Mildred L. 1995. Meaning-Based Translation: A

Guide to Cross-Language Equivalence. (Second

Edition). USA: University Press of America, Inc,

Molina, L and Albir, A.H. 2002. Translation techniques

revisited: A dynamic and functionalist approach. Meta:

Journal des Traducteurs/Meta: Translators’ Journal

47(4): 498-512.

Newmark, P., 1988. A Text Book of Translation. London:

Prentice Hall. p. 45-82.

Nida, Eugene 1964. 2000. “Principles of Correspondence”

dalam Lawerence Venuti (Ed.). The Translation Studies

Reader, pp. 126-147. New York:Routledge.

Pusat Bahasa Departemen Pendidikan Nasional, 2007.

Pedoman Umum Pembentukan Istilah. Jakarta:

Kementrian Pendidikan Nasional.

Vinay, J.P. & Dalbernet, J. in L. Venuti 2000. A

Methodology for Translation. London: Routledge,

p.84-93.

Venuti, Lawrence (Ed.) 2000. The Translation Studies

Reader. New York: Routledge

CONAPLIN and ICOLLITE 2017 - Tenth Conference on Applied Linguistics and the Second English Language Teaching and Technology

Conference in collaboration with the First International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture, and Education