An Analysis of Cultural Terms and Their Translating Techniques in The Blood of Olympus: The Heroes of Olympus series

The aims of this study were to investigate the cultural terms categories, to describe their translating techniques used and to reveal the translation ideology that is used by the translator in the novel The Blood of Olympus, one of The Heroes of Olympus series from English into Indonesian. This study applied a content analysis focused on qualitative content analysis. The source of this study was the novel The Blood of Olympus, one of Heroes of Olympus series containing the cultural terms which is written by Rick Riordan in English and translated into Indonesian by Reni Indardini. The unit of analysis of this study was the words and phrases indicating the cultural terms. The instrument used in this study was human instrument who undertook the direct observation. The techniques used in collecting data were reading and note taking techniques. The validity used in this study was semantic validity and expert judgment while the reliability was intra-rater and inter-rater. The data analysis applied in this study was Miles, Huberman and Saldana’s data analysis with three flows activity namely data condensation, data display and conclusion or drawing a verification. The results of this study were as follows. Firstly, there were 201 data classified as the cultural terms. The data were classified into seven categories namely material terms (76); myth terms (54); geographical terms (24); organization, customs and ideas (15); military terms (13); ecology (10); social culture (8). Secondly, of 14 translation techniques, only 10 techniques were used in this study namely pure borrowing (94); calque (56); transposition (15); literal translation (12); naturalized borrowing (10); amplification (5); adaptation (4); reduction (3); particularization (1); and established equivalent (1) and thirdly, the translation ideology used is foreignization (80.60%). In this study, the material and the myth category are the most category found due to the main topic of the novel is around Greek mythology. Then, for translating techniques, pure borrowing was the mostly used in translating the cultural terms. Overall the techniques used in translating cultural terms were appropriate but some terms for institution or company brand translated by using literal translation were considered as inappropriate technique use since the use of it loses a local color or local content of the terms. Therefore, to maintain its color, the implementation of appropriate technique use needs to be overtaken in order to generate good translation. Foreignization ideology inclination used by the translator in translating cultural terms. It is due to the fact that most cultural terms belongs to the term about Greek mythology. Therefore if the translator uses the domestication ideology she will alter the Greek mythology into target culture mythology. Keywords: cultural terms, translation techniques, translation ideology, nove