TRANSCON 2014, UNIKA ATMAJAYA AESTHETICISATION: TRANSLATING NOVELS INTO MOTHER TONGUE By Kahar Dwi Prihantono BALAI BAHASA PROVINSI JAWA TENGAH Jalan Elang Raya No. 1, Mangunharjo, Tembalang, Semarang, Telepon 024-70769945 Faksimile 024-70799945 Pos-el: akang_har@yahoo.com Abstract This paper investigates an ideology in novel translation. The findings are used to explore a new translation strategies applied by a translator which has an ideological impacts as one of the variables that affect the translation result. A new strategy, ‘aestheticising’, is successfully performed by Ahmad Tohari, a great short story writer, novelist, and translator, who conducted a unique genre of literary translation hardly done by common translators. Over the years, literary translation is believed to function only as a literature documentation since it involved a local language as the source language. What was done by Ahmad Tohari was unique. As a native speaker of a local language involved in his translation, he has led the emergence of a new ideology that allows the target language able to express the aesthetics of literature better than the source text does. A total of 2 translated novels, Ronggeng Dukuh Paruk versi Banyumasan and Jegingger demonstrate the strategy. The finding shows that the most frequently used strategy is. The expressivity/ness is the most frequent used strategy. The translator provides the target language wider room to express itself by taking advantages of descriptive empowering of detailed social and cultural lexicons. Set within the ideological framework, the highest frequency of a strategy, expressivity/ness, brings target text audience close to their own culture and boosts their cultural pride through the reading of the translated novels. Instead of expressivity/ness, the new ideology is characterized by the principles of explicitation, cultural pride conveyance, social or political change stimuli, emotion transport, feeling of autonomy, aesthetic property, and value. Those principles determines a certain strategy contribute ideological impacts of the translation and the target language (mother tongue). They also contribute to the local language preservation policy of the local government in Central Java that is optimistic about the Penginyongan language (Banyumasan language) preservation. This ’aestheticisation’ focus can be inferred as being affected by the prevailing ideology of ethnical struggle for identity. Since translation is an ideologically-constrained and socio- culturally-situated activity in the areas of language preservation and maintenance, this study may encourage Indonesian translators to take apart in translating other literary works (of the same characteristics) into their mother tongue. Key word: translation, aestheticisation, ideology, expressivity, explicitation, cultural pride conveyance, social or political change stimuli, emotion transport, feeling of autonomy, aesthetic property, and value 1. Ideologies in translation Venuti’s notions of foreignisation and domestication and his claim that ‘translation wields enormous power in constructing representations of foreign cultures’ (1998a: 67) are naturally drawn by translators when they are starting to investigate intercultural exchange issues in translation. According to Venuti (1998b: 240), foreignisation and domestication as overall translation strategies take place at two levels: the macro-level – with the selection of foreign texts to be translated – and the micro-level, i.e. the actual methods used to translate them. For Venuti (1992; 1995a; 1995b; 1998b), domestication is a natural tendency of translation and consists in translating in a fluent, idiomatic, and transparent way which tends to erase the foreignness of the source text and to conform to the needs and values of the domestic/target culture. Venuti states that: