Modulation in Indonesian Translation of National Geographic Articles

Abstract

This study investigates the types of modulation which were used on the translation process of National Geographic Magazine of June 2014 both on USA and Indonesian issue. The purposes of this study areto describe the use of modulation in translating “National Geographic” from English to Indonesian and to describe the maintenance of the source target meaning in the target text. The qualitative approach was used to describe the quantitative data which was got from the analysis. The data of this study was collected using reading and inventorying stages and analyzed using comparing, identifying, and evaluating process. The collected data then was analyzed to investigate the modulation‟s impact on message maintenance. Based on those analyses, substitution has the highest rank of modulation type used on the magazine‟s articles (37.8% of total 111 data) followed by reversal (34.2%), deviation (14.4%), specification (8.1%), and generalization (5.4%) sequentially. This result is linear to the maintenance of message rating which was taken from five English Department lecturer raters. It shows that the highest number of score 3 (well delivered) percentage ratio is obtained by specification (75.5%) followed by reversal (72.6%), deviation (72.5%), substitution (71.2%) and generalization (60%). From the result above it can be seen that the more frequent occurrence does not always mean to be so effective compared to the less frequent one. The highest percentage of successful maintenance was obtained by specification, which is on 4th rank on the frequency of occurrence table. The most frequent type of modulation, substitution, only settles on 4th rank on the table of score 3. On the other hand, the most distorted type of modulation is gotten by reversal with 9.5% on score 1, while the least distorted one is gotten by generalization.

Keywords

• articles
• magazine
• modulation
• national geographic
• strategy
• translation