Chesterman’s Pragmatic Strategies in Translating Sundanese Folklore Into English

Abstract

English scholar and translator Andrew Chesterman offers three major strategies of translation when dealing with any kind of source texts: syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic. Moreover, these three strategies can be applied either separately or with two or all three of them used together depending on the need to get a natural equivalent in the target text. This article is about the emergence of one of Chesterman’s strategies – the pragmatic strategies - in the translation of Sundanese folklore from the Sundanese language into the English target text. The Sundanese language is a local language spoken by Sundanese people mostly living in West Java, Indonesia. Its existence is in such a critical situation that if there are no efforts from any communities, institutions, or government to preserve it, this local language will gradually go extinct. This research is one of the ways to participate in preserving the language. Using Chesterman’s concept of pragmatic strategies, this research aims to reveal the emergence of each type of pragmatic strategy in the English target text and identify the most dominant strategy used. The method used is a descriptive qualitative method focusing on the use of words either in the linguistic unit of the clause, the phrase or the word itself. The efforts made by the translator in giving the closest natural equivalent in the target text can be observed in the results of this research. The results show that all types of pragmatic strategies were used, but the strategy used most frequently was the explicitness change strategy.