Adjustments in Indonesian-English Translation of Public Signs in Bali

Abstract

Public signs that are written in two languages are language phenomena found in some regions in Bali. This study is to explore the translation of public signs from Indonesian into English found in Bali. Deploying the concept of pragmatic equivalence (House, 2015) and translation shifts (Catford, 1965), this study focuses on the adjustments found in the translation of public signs from Indonesian into English. The data were taken from the public signs found in Badung regency and Denpasar city, Bali province, Indonesia by taking photos. The finding reveals that public signs in Bali are realized in the forms of non-sentence and sentence. The non-sentence used includes noun phrase, verb phrase, adjective phrase, adverbial phrase, and preposition. Public signs in the form of sentence include declarative, interrogative, and imperative sentence. To achieve the equivalence, the source public signs are rendered by re-contextualizing their forms in target language. The re-contextualization includes the change from sentence into non-sentence, non-sentence into sentence, one type of sentence into another type, one form of non-sentence into another form, the change of unit and of phrase/clause structure.