EQUIVALENCE STRATEGIES IN THE TRANSLATION OF ENGLISH SLANGS INTO BAHASA INDONESIA

There are some problems of equivalence of word and phrase which are faced by translators who are doing translation. Experts in translation have proposed some strategies dealing with problems of equivalence at word level and above word level by Mona Baker are used in the translation. The purpose of the study is to describe the strategies used by the translator at word level and above word level as well as to find out the dominant strategies used in the translation of a novel by Agatha Christi entitled The ABC Murders. The base of the theory used is the theory of Mona Baker (1992) on equivalence strategy in the translation of two different levels which are at the word level and above word level. The method which is used in this study is a library research. In analyzing the data the researcher used a qualitative method. Then to find the dominant strategies both at word level and above word level, formula is used Malo. The results of the study shown that there is one strategy suggested by Mona Baker which is not applied in the translation, that is translation by cultural sustitution at word level. The translator also used another strategy: translation by addition. Translation by a more general word is the dominant strategy used by translators (48.31%). The reason why translation by a more general word more dominant is the translator given semantic field to find a more general word that covers the core propositional meaning of the missing hyponym in the target language. This is one of the commonest strategies with many types of non-equivalence. While in translating phrases into the target language, the translator used translation by similar meaning and form as the most dominant (55%). This strategy is used when the translator finds no difficulties in finding the equivalence and serving the acceptable and natural translation by translating the original text word by word without any changes both in meaning and form. It means the translator still try to maintain the form and the meaning of the terms from Source Language into Target Language.