EFL STUDENTS’ USE OF PASSIVE VOICE IN THEIR INDONESIAN-ENGLISH TRANSLATION PROJECTS: METHODS & PROBLEMS

Abstract

This research aims to determine how the students did their translation projects in the past, as well as the problems they encountered, in the hope of establishing an effective solution to the problem. A case study was employed to collect the data. The process of collecting research data utilized both document analysis and interviews. The documents analyzed were in the form of the fourth-semester students’ translation projects from the Translating Indonesian-English class project. The said analysis was conducted in order to discover how the students translated passive voice from Indonesian to English and their tendencies in this matter. Meanwhile, the researcher also interviewed the students participating in this research to better understand the difficulties they encountered as they did their translation projects in the past. From the study conducted, the students made a tendency to preserve the passive voice. Such tendencies correlate with students' difficulty in grammatical feature comprehension and lack of vocabulary mastery. It indicates that there is an underlying problem in students’ grammatical skills. Further, there is also a problem with students’ abilities to choose the appropriate term to apply in their translations, which stems from their lack of vocabulary. Therefore, the solution proposed is to pay more attention to students’ grammatical skills before they learn to translate. Also, this study suggests further investigation regarding the influence of students’ perceptions of translation on their translation performances.