12 CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
A. Background and Summary
Reading literary work such as novel can be more special for some people rather than watching film or movies. There is plenty of figurative language in the text that offers unlimited imaginations to the readers. Metaphors and similes are most common figurative language that can be found in literary works. Gibbs (2008: 233) states “The literary researcher uses metaphor to go beyond and extend our ordinary linguistic and or conceptual resources and to provide novel insights and perspectives into human experiences”. Yet, unfortunately many translators only translate literal meaning and forget to keep the aesthetic values of the story in the novel. According to Larson (1984: 247), the correct understanding of any simile depends on the correct identification of the topic and image. Identifying the topic and image of the similes in the SL is an important key to understand similes in the TL, where the meaning in the SL must be fully comprehended first. Thus, translation criticism is needed to improve ones’ ability in translation to enhance the quality of their translation. Translation criticism enables both translator and researcher to develop their translation ability by giving feedback and/or suggestion. Critique translation has similar concept to literary researcherism in world literature. They evaluate literary works and focus on the impact for society. According to Peter Newmark in his book “A Textbook of Translation” (1998), there are some points to consider by translation researchers, including how to do a researcheral analysis over source text; to understand the translator’s intention and attitude; to compare ST to TT; and to evaluate translation.
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children was selected because it is a literary book
reflecting social phenomena that becomes the biggest concern to the researcher. There are plenty of issues which society is facing today, including teen issues. The researcher finds the connection between the literary work written for young adults to the issues. Exploring literature can be a way to understand the issues happening. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children novel by
13 later are issues concerning about relationship and the power of youth. Here, the researcher decided to analyze fiction novel by Ransom Riggs and its translated version Rumah Miss
Peregrine Untuk Anak – Anak Aneh as translated by Tanti Lesmana focusing on the translation of the metaphor and simile. The novel tells us about a sixteen-year-old boy, Jacob Portman who goes on a journey to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers an abandoned orphanage. He grows up up listening to his grandfather’s stories about a children's home where each child had a supernatural ability, such as levitating or becoming invisible. As he gets older, he begins to doubt these as fiction. One day, he finds Grandpa Portman (Abe) is savagely
murdered by a mysterious creature in the woods. Jacob tells his parents about this but no one trusts him, instead of bringing him to psychiatrist. Later, he convinces his parents to let him travel to the island where Abe whispered to Jacob before he died. Along with his dad, Jacob travel to mysterious island in Wales, in search of the truth behind Abe's stories about Miss Peregrine and her home for peculiar children. One day, however, as he is exploring the ruins, he meets a girl (Emma) and tries to chase her. He follows her, but she ends up taking him through a mysterious tunnel into the past. The time loop repeats the same, safe, perfect day over and over, exactly in September 3, 1940. It is set by Miss Peregrine in order to keep the peculiar children safe. Miss Peregrine and the children tell Jacob that they are hunted by hollowgasts, which are the monstrous remains of peculiar creatures who once tried to use time loops to make themselves immortal. Hollowgasts are served by wights, which are hollows that have eaten peculiar people to revert back to some semblance of their human form. At last, Jacob successfully kills the hollow, but the wight has gone into the loop and kidnaps Miss Peregrine. Due to what the wight did to her, Miss Peregrine is stuck in her bird form and the loop has not reset. Jacob decides to stay in the past with Emma and the other peculiar children to fight off wights and hollowgasts. They go in search of the wights in order to stop the unwanted things that would happen to the world due to their immortality experiment. Then, he, Emma, and the children sail away from the island, bringing a map of all existing time loops as their only guide.
The analysis of metaphors and similes is important because they appear the most in the text. The use of figure of speech may involve a risk of misinterpretation. Translating metaphors
14 precise meaning of metaphor and simile in order not to reduce the aesthetic value of the ST. The phenomenon above leads the researcher to analyze further the metaphors and similes translation in the novel Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs.
B. Research Questions
Metaphors can be analyzed using Peter Newmark’s theory, meanwhile Pierini’s theory (2007) can be helpful to identify and analyze similes. For further understanding, this paper will apply the theories to prove to readers about this claim, and research questions that will be
discussed in this paper are:
1. What strategies are used by the translator to translate metaphors and similes in novel Miss
Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children into Bahasa version Rumah Miss Peregrine Untuk
Anak-Anak Aneh?
2. How to improve the quality of translation of metaphors and similes in novel Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children into Bahasa version Rumah Miss Peregrine Untuk Anak-Anak Aneh?
C. Research Objectives
This research aims to:
1. Identify the strategies applied by the translator based on Newmark and Pierini’s theories.
2. To analyse the translation based on Newmark and Pierini’s theories to improve the quality of translation in the target text.
15 This research aims to bring benefits to the readers so they can obtain the message of the story as close as possible to the author’s intention without reducing the aesthetic values from ST. In terms of translation, this research is aimed to be helpful for translation students by giving information and knowledge about metaphor and simile and how to translate them. Meanwhile for lecturers, this research can be useful as a significant material for developing the translation studies, especially in translating metaphor and simile and maintaining the aesthetic values of a text using relevant theories by Newmark and Pierini.
E. About the Author and Translator
A good translator should be able to translate any kinds of translation as intended by the author. They need to have wide knowledge about the source and target languages to express the message accurately. The strategies proposed by theorists will help the translators to deal with non-equivalence by analyzing the styles of the author and translator. Here are brief biographies of the author and translator of the novel Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children (2011).
1. The Author
Ransom Riggs is an American researcher, photographer and also screenresearcher. He was born in Maryland in 1979 and grew up in Florida, where he attended Pine View School for the Gifted. He studied English literature at Kenyon College and studied film at the University of Southern California. Riggs married his wife who is also an author, Tahereh Mafi in 2003. His hobby is interesting which is collecting photographs. Most of them are included in his books and they influence his writing style significantly. According to Riggs those vintage photographs worth a thousand words. He uses a lot metaphors and similes in his novel to explain every little thing including the attached photographs. Here, the researcher senses creative influence to literature that inspiration has no limit. His works included The Sherlock Holmes Handbook: The
Methods and Mysteries of the World's Greatest Detective, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar
Children, Talking Pictures: Images and Messages Rescued from the P ast, Hollow City: The
Second Novel of Miss Peregrine's Children, Library of Souls: The Third Novel of Miss
16 Riggs loves collecting vernacular photographs and attaching some of them in the book. Regarding to that, people can find regional language usually mentioned in the text. Then, he used the photographs and put them together a narrative. The results are Miss Peregrine's Home for
Peculiar Children, which made The New York Times Best Seller list. It was adapted into the 2016 film using the same name. Another book inspired by old photographs are Talking Pictures (2012), The second and third sequel of Miss Peregrine's series, Hollow City (2014) and Library
of Souls (2015).
2. The Translator
Tanti Lesmana is a translator who works for the publisher industry, PT. Gramedia Pustaka Utama. She is known for her contribution translating many English novels. Her recent work is Rumah Miss Peregrine untuk Anak - Anak Aneh, which is the Bahasa translation of “Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children”. The English book was released in 2011 and the translator estimated the release time very well. After she heard good feedback from the movie version, the Bahasa version was released in 2016. Her translating style is very universal resembling other translator which is to preserve the equivalence from source language to target language. Her other works are including The Alchemist - Sang Alkemis by Paulo Coelho, Kisah Pi by Yann Martel, Me Before You - Sebelum Mengenalmu by Jojo Moyes, and Coraline by Neil Gaiman.
E. Methodology
Initially, the study of translation was classified under linguistics, aiming to construct empirical science and establish a place for the discipline in the academu among other various sciences (John C. Catford’s book A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics, 1965). It defines translation as comprising a “substitution of TL meaning for SL meanings. The framework proposed by Newmark (1988, 45-47) is used to analyze the data
collected by using the following steps:
17 The researcher collected and sellected metaphors and similes translation from Miss
Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children to Rumah Miss Peregrine Untuk Anak-Anak Aneh. It
aims to identify the similarity and/or differences of metaphor and simile translation from both texts and then provide solution to improve the quality of translation.
2. Data Analysis
There are several steps done in the research:
a. Classifying metaphors and similes found from ST and TT.
b. Analyzing metaphors and similes translation according to the translator’s style.
c. Identifying and analyzing metaphors and similes translation using Newmark and Pierini’s
strategies.
