Voice changes in translation from English to Indonesian and vice versa

Voice is a grammatical category of verbs that is related to what thing or person is acting and what thing or person is being acted upon (Crystal, 1997). A verb is in the active voice when used to talk about what people and things do; verbs in the passive voice describe what is done to things (Swan, 1995). According to Swan, not all verbs can be expressed in the passive voice, for example die, arrive and have are all inherently active. This is related to whether a verb is transitive or intransitive. In translation, ideally, an active verb should be translated to an active verb in the equivalent target language. However, this is not always the case. There are times when an English sentence cannot be translated in the parallel voice in the target language. For an instance, when translating an English sentence "He broke his leg" into its Indonesian counterpart "Kakinya patah" (His leg was broken), there is a voice change of the active verb "broke" into a passive one "patah" (broken) to make the translation sound more acceptable to the audience of the target language. This paper intends to explore the phenomenon of the voice changes when translating utterance from English to Indonesian and VIce versa