THE UNIQUE TRANSLATION STRATEGY OF NOVEL TITLES

Abstract

Titles of literary works such as novels plays an important role in attracting possible readers. Novel titles should also reflect the contents of the books. When a book is translated to other languages, the title should be translated accordingly. Novel titles are not always translated literally in the target language, they may vary from one country to another. For example, in “Harry Potter and the philosopher stone” in the UK, the phrase ‘philosopher stone’ is translated into ‘sorcerer’s stone’ in the US and ‘batu bertuah’ (miracle stone) in Indonesia. In French it is even translated into ‘Harry Potter a l’ecole des sorciers’ (Harry Potter in the school of witches). This study aims to investigate the translation strategies of English novel titles to Indonesian. By searching the internet and from private book collection, the writer collect 50 English novels which have been translated and published in Indonesian. Based on the writer’s personal preference, all the novels belong to thriller/suspense genre. The data collected were 50 English titles and their translations in Indonesian. Before arriving at this number of data, a preliminary selection has been done by eliminating the target text titles that were using literal translation strategy. This is deliberately done to discover the unique translation strategy of novel titles and to find out the reason for the specific translation strategy.  Three main theories are used to analyse the novel titles, they are functions of title translation as suggested by Nord (2005) and Viezzi model translation (2013) and Vinay & Dalbernet (1995) translation strategies. In translating the titles, equivalence is pursued, but if it is not possible, there are other ways to accomplish it.  The results show strategies such as adaptation, modulation, equivalence, and transposition are used to translate novel titles to Indonesian. Meanwhile based on Viezzi model, the target titles are categorised into explicit, indicative of the genre, suggestive, and seductive. This study would raise the translators’ awareness to choose more communicative and creative titles for literary translation tasks, including novels and other literary works.