The Indonesian translation of swearwords in J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in The Rye”

This research is conducted based on qualitative research design with descriptive quantitative analysis. The data is swearwords in Indonesian and English as used in the novel The Catcher in the Rye. The Indonesian swearwords are taken from the translated version with same title. The purposes of this research are to find out what strategies being used to translate the swearwords in the American classic novel The Catcher in the Rye and the result of the translator’s decision when she translated it into the Indonesian language. Three strategies were applied to translate the swearwords from the source text and they were omission, softening and literal translation strategies. The chart and table showed that the total of swearwords in the source text is 488 swearwords. However, in the target text, 69 percent of swearwords were omitted, 20 percent being translated using literal strategy and 11 percent was done using softening translation strategy. Based on the result above, omission strategy had the highest frequency in the target text due to swearwords in the novel. The translator took a step ahead in justifying that this strategy may sound rather drastic, but in fact it does no harm to omit while translating a word or expression in some contexts. Although the result is less accurate, the target text becomes more readable and friendly for Indonesian readers