Translating Literary Dialect: Problems and Solutions

This paper discusses the true challenges of Indonesian translators in dealing with literary dialects, in particular the African American dialect in Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It also seeks to provide the potential procedure to be used to ensure success in the target text. Four translators of the three Indonesian versions of the novel were asked to provide information on the difficulties they experienced in translating the utterances of the black characters. The result of the analysis reveals the problems encountered by the translators in understanding the words printed in non-standard spellings, recognizing the type of dialect and the roles of the AAE dialect in the novel, choosing the Indonesian language variation to transform the AAE dialect, and finding the literary dialect in Indonesian. Some successful methods have been selected by the translators as solutions to the problems they encounter, although some of their approaches contribute to problems related to different characterization and difficult to understand translations.