Translation Quality of Sexist Language in the Novel Little

Men by Loisa May Alcott

Nurochman

; M.R. Nababan

; Riyadi Santosa

; Diah Kristina

Doctoral Student of Universitas Sebelas Maret Surakarta Indonesia

Keywords: Sexist Language, Gender, Translator, Technique of Translation, Quality of Translation

Abstract: The study is designed to find out the quality of translation from novel Little Men. Its translations in

Indonesian are translated by man and woman (different gender). The aims of the study are (1) to find out the

kinds of sexist language in the novel Little Men, (2) to find out the techniques of translation, (3) to analyse

the quality of translation based on gender of translators. The study uses a descriptive qualitative method. In

this case, the researcher collects, classifies, and describes the data using the method. To get the data, the

writer read the English and the Indonesian novel carefully and identified the kinds of sexist language. The

researcher got 183 data. After finding out the data from the English and Indonesian versions, the data were

verified by the expert and the translations were analysed by raters related to the quality of translation. The

result of the analysis shows that there are 7 man as standard, 112 women are different, 9 non-human terms,

3 negative words, and 52 sex role descriptor. It shows different techniques of translation applied by

translators as well as the quality of translation.

1 INTRODUCTION

Sexism is usually connected to women and focused

on the inequality that women obtain in social life.

Sexist language is a term used to denote a wide

range of very different element, from the use of such

items as generic pronouns, such as ‘he’ (when used

to refer to both males and females); word ending ‘-

ette’ e.g., usherette; nouns referring to men and

women, e.g., waiter and waitress which seem to

have different range of meaning, (Mills, 2008).

Sexist language is often expressed by people in

society, e.g., women are always talkative, men never

cry, men must be breadwinners, etc. Sexist against

not only women but also men. However, sexists

generally against women, as stated by Umera-Okeke

(2012) that in most societies, it is commonly shown

in behaviors that depict males as superiors to

females. Lei (2006) also states that sexist language

is language that expresses bias and favor of one sex

and thus treats the other sex in a discriminatory

manner. In most cases, the bias is in favor of men

and women and against women. Referring to the

explanation of sexist language above, it will be an

interesting topic to discuss if it is connected to

translation. Moreover, if there are two translators

with different gender translating sexist language, it

will be very meaningful to analyze the quality of

translation. Related to translation, sexist language

can be a very interesting topic to study, moreover the

translators are in different gender that can be

influenced by the gender itself. If the sexist words

or phrases against a man, can he retain the original

words to translate or he will try to change into

another expression that will affect the quality of

translation. Conversely, if the words or phrases

against woman, can she still retain the original

meaning, or she is influenced by the gender then she

paraphrases the words, or maybe she will change

and divert the meaning. They are the phenomena

that will be analyzed.

The study has the following aims: 1) to find out

the kinds of sexist language in the novel Little Men,

2) to find out the techniques of translation applied

by translators (man and women) in translating sexist

language, 3) to analyze the quality of translation for

sexist language from the accuracy, acceptability,

and readability translated by different gender.

Nurochman, ., Nababan, M., Santosa, R. and Kristina, D.

Translation Quality of Sexist Language in the Novel Little Men by Loisa May Alcott.

DOI: 10.5220/0008217600002284

In Proceedings of the 1st Bandung English Language Teaching International Conference (BELTIC 2018) - Developing ELT in the 21st Century, pages 53-57

ISBN: 978-989-758-416-9

2 THEORETICAL

BACKGROUND

2.1 Concept of Translation

Catford (1978) stated that translation is the

replacement of textual material in another language.

Larson (1984) also explained that translation

consists of transferring meaning of the source

language into the receptor language which is done

by going from the form of the first language to the

form of second language in semantic structure.

According to Nida and Taber (1982), translating

consists of reproducing in the receptor language the

closest natural equivalent of the source language,

the first terms of meaning and secondly in terms of

style. From the three definitions above the

researcher concludes that translation is transferring

meaning, messages, ideas form the source language

into target language. The process of translation

consists of three phases, they are (1) analysis of the

text in the source language, (2) transferring the

message, and (3) restructuring. (Nida & Taber,

1982).

2.2 Technique of Translation

Molina and Albir (2002) defined that translation

technique as procedures to analyze and classify how

translation equivalence works. It has some basic

characteristics, they are 1) affecting the result of

translation, 2) it is classified by comparing with the

original text, 3) affecting micro-units of the text, 4)

it is by nature discursive and contextual, and 5) it is

functional.

Molina and Albir (2002) explained that there are

eighteen translation techniques, they are adaption,

amplification, borrowing, calque, compensation,

description, discursive creation, established

equivalent, generalization, linguistic amplification,

linguistic compression, literal translation,

particularization, reduction, substitution,

transposition, and variation.

2.3 Quality of Translation

To analyze the quality of translation, related to the

accuracy, acceptability and readability, the

researcher used the instrument of translation quality

assessment from Nababan et al (2012).

Table 1: Scoring system of Accuracy aspect (Nabahan et

al., 2012)

read more than once to

understand the translation.

Unreadable

Translation is difficult for

the reader to understand.

2.4 Kinds of Sexist Language

Rybacki and Rybacki (1991) states that there are

five kinds of sexist language, they are: 1) Man as

Standard, 2) Women Are Different, 3) Non-Human

Terms, 4) Negative Words, and the last, 5) Sex-Role

Descriptors.

2.5 Gender and Translation

Translation is transferring the meaning from source

language into target language. Source language

belongs to men and women as well the target

language. The essence of translation is a process of

taking decision when transferring the meaning.

When translating, it can be affected by some factors

such as gender of translator, the understanding of

translation theory, culture, and others. Gender of

translator can also has influence in

translating

a text,

moreover she is a feminist. She usually tries hard to

neutralize the gender bias in the source language

into target language. The effect of her work is the

element of sexist in the source language will be

changed into neutral gender. In accordance with the

explanation in advance, Yang (2014) states that

Feminist translators make creative intervention to

their translation in order to minimize gender

discrimination especially to women.

3 METHOD

The study used qualitative method. Sutopo (2006)

stated that the data used in qualitative research are

in the form of utterance, words, clauses, and

discourse. Creswell and Creswell (2017) also

explained qualitative research relies on text and

image data, have unique steps in data analysis, and

draw on diverse design. In addition, qualitative

researches collect data themselves through

examining documents, observations, focus on

learning the data, review all the data, make sense of it

and organize it into categories that cut across all of

the data source.

The source of the data is an English novel Little

Men and two Indonesian translations translated by

two translators (different gender). The researcher

collected, classified, described, and analyzed the

data. The researcher got 183 data of sexist language

in English version. After being collected, the

English and Indonesian versions of the data were

verified by the expert and the translations were

analyzed and assessed by raters related to the quality

of translation through Focus Group of Discussion

(FGD). The researcher gave questioners related to

the kind of sexist language, technique of translation

and quality of translation from the accuracy,

acceptability and readability.

4 RESULTS

Table 4. Findings Kinds of Sexist language in The Novel

Little Men.

Kinds of Sexist language

Quantity

Percentage

Men as Standard

04 %

Women Are Different

112

61 %

Non-Human Terms

05 %

Negative Words

02 %

Sex-Role Descriptors

28 %

Total

183

100 %

Table 5. Findings Technique of Translation Applied by

Male Translator

Kinds of Sexist language

Quantity

Percentage

Pure borrowing

38 %

Established equivalence

21 %

Generalization

22 %

Deletion

2.5 %

Discursive creation

1 %

Modulation

4 %

Adaptation

3 %

Explicit

5.4 %

Implicit

2.5 %

Particularization

0.6 %

Total

204

100 %

Translation Quality of Sexist Language in the Novel Little Men by Loisa May Alcott

Table 6. Findings Technique of Translation Applied by

Femaale Translator

Kinds of Sexist language

Quantity

Percentage

Established equivalence

23 %

Generalization

22 %

Pure borrowing

0.5 %

Adaptation

45 %

Explicit

0.5 %

Modulation

1.6 %

Deletion

0.5 %

Implicit

01 %

Discursive creation

0.5 %

Description

0.6 %

Particularization

01 %

Literal

0.6 %

Addition

0.6 %

Variation

0.6 %

Total

190

100 %

Table 7. Findings the Comparison of the Quality of

Translation for Sexist Language Translated by Male and

Female in the Novel Little Men.

Novel

Translators

Average of translation quality

Accuracy

Acceptability

Readability

Little

Men

Man

2,525

2,752

2,762

Woman

2,582

2,816

2,899

5 DISCUSSION

Kind of sexist language is used to classify the sexist

language in the novel Little Men. Women are different is

the mostly used, and then sex-role descriptors. The next

kind of sexist language is non-human terms and then man

as standard. And the least kind of sexist language is

negative words from women are different, the usage of

Mrs. and Miss is very dominant, while the negative words

in this novel are only mistress and molly-coddles. Most of

the sexist language in the novel against women. The

setting of the novel is in America as well as the writer of

the novel, where the society still holds the patriarchal. The

inequality of gender really occurs there.

The techniques of translation that is mostly applied, by

man translator is pure borrowing while by woman

translator is adaptation. Pure borrowing and adaptation

have the same accuracy but different in acceptability and

readability. Pure borrowing technique is not acceptable but

adaptation technique is acceptable. Related to the

readability, pure borrowing is less readable whereas the

adaption is readable. The second techniques mostly applied

by both translators (man and woman) are the same, i.e.,

established equivalence, and generalization. Pure

borrowing, adaptation and established equivalence have

high accuracy, while generalization is less accurate, e.g.,

the word maid is translated into pelayan not pelayan

wanita /perempuan, postman is translated into tukangpos

not tukang pos laki-laki/pria. Man translator only applied

ten techniques of translation, and did not apply description,

literal, variation and addition techniques, whereas another

one applied fourteen techniques and applied four

techniques of description, literal, variation and addition.

From table 6 and 7, it can be identified that the usage

of techniques of translation can affect the quality of

translation. Technique of deletion (total reduction) and

literal can reduce the quality of translation as well as the

accuracy, acceptability and readability. The frequency of

the techniques applied can also influence the quality of

translation. From table 4, it can be concluded that woman

translator has higher quality of translation concerning with

sexist language in the novel Little Men. Generally, the

woman translator is not influenced by the gender itself

even though some sexist languages against women.

6 CONCLUSION

The result of the study indicates that the kinds of sexist

language in novel Little Men are Man as Standard (7),

women are different (112), non-human terms (9), negative

words (3), and sex-role descriptors (52). For the

techniques applied by translators; male translator applied

10 techniques of translation, while female translator

applied 14 techniques of translation. The male translators

applied deletion, implicit, and addition while female

translator did not apply them. From the result, it can be

concluded that female translator has higher quality of

translation from the accuracy (2,582: 2,525), acceptability

(2,816: 2,742), and readability (2,899: 2,762). The Total

quality of translation between female and male translators

is 2,712: 2,637. It can be concluded that female translator

has higher quality of translation than male translator in

translating sexist language from novel Little Men.

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Translation Quality of Sexist Language in the Novel Little Men by Loisa May Alcott