THE ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT FROM ENGLISH INTO INDONESIAN (A Case Study of the 4th Semester of English Education Study Program in Universitas Bengkulu

The objective of this research was to find out the students‟ difficulties in
translating descriptive text from English to Indonesian. The method of this
research was descriptive, using a quantitative approach. The subject of this study
was the 4th Semester of the English Education Study Program of Universitas
Bengkulu, with a total number of 112 students which consisted of three classes.
The sample of this research was one of the classes in the 4th Semester of the
English Education Study Program of Universitas Bengkulu students, the students
of class C, which consisted of 37 students. After conducting the research and
doing data analysis, the researcher concluded that students in the 4th Semester of
the English Education Study Program of Universitas Bengkulu had difficulties in
translating descriptive text that was influenced by linguistic factors (ambiguous
sentences, long sentences, idiom, and meaning of the whole sentence) and non�linguistic factors (ideological terms, geographical terms, social-political terms,
economic terms, and architectural). In linguistic factors, the difficulties were
dominantly in translating ambiguous sentences (32.4%), followed by translating
long sentences (24.3%), idiom (24.3%), and meaning of the whole sentence
(24.3%). And the difficulties related to non-linguistic factors were found
dominantly in translating ideological terms (43.2%), followed by translating
geographical (29.7%), social-political (24.3%), economic (18.9%), and
architectural terms (18.9%). There are some suggestions that the researcher can
propose after researching as follows: The lecturer should give various practices to
the students in translating a text, The lecturer should search for some information
about strategies or methods in teaching, The researcher is suggested to other
researchers to investigate more difficulties in translating English text, and to
investigate the strategies to teach translation in the classroom, The lecturer should
give more practices in translating activity