Identity struggle through the negotiation of cultural identity in the translation of French cultural references into Javanese

Abstract

Cultural identity negotiations occur not only in cross-cultural communication but also translation acts. The justification that the translation process involved not only two languages but also two different cultural traditions raises awareness of the importance of translation as a means of cross-cultural communication. This study aims to reveal the negotiation of French’s cultural identity in Javanese translation by positioning the Javanese language and culture as ‘self’ and French as ‘others.’ Under descriptive-qualitative research, 433 pairs of French-Javanese narratives from Albert Camus’s 1943 novel L’Étranger and its Javanese translation Wong Njaba’ (2010) translated by Revo Arka Giri Soekatno were used as the objects in this study. Through careful examination, four possibilities emerge as the impact of French cultural identity’s negotiation into Javanese: the target language’s meaning becomes completely equivalent, narrower, broader, or inequivalent to the source culture’s meaning. These possibilities arise from the translator’s consciousness to reduce the level of strangeness that may interfere with the target reader’s concentration and reception. This present study concludes that the translator tends to negotiate semantically two languages within similar semantic vocabularies. Nonetheless, the form is borrowed or negotiated if there is no cultural activity in Javanese similar to French cultural activity. This study contributes to the study of cultural identity by incorporating linguistic and cultural perspectives into translation studies.

Keywords

• cultural identity
• cultural references
• translation
• negotiation
• equivalence