The Universality and Uniqueness of Proverb and Its Impact on Translation

DOI

10.2991/eltlt-18.2019.53How to use a DOI?

Keywords

culture, equivalent, meaning, proverb, translation

Abstract

As a linguistic resource, proverb functions to show facts, human socio-cultural experiences and to give advice to human beings about life. It is very common that a proverb used in one culture is also used in other cultures with similar meaning but generally in different linguistic form (structure and diction). On the other hand there are proverbs which are culture-specific, i.e. only in a certain culture the proverb exists not in the others. This study has tried to address the phenomenon of universality and uniqueness of proverbs across cultures i.e. English, Indonesian and Mandailing. Five proverbs from English, five from Indonesian and five from Mandailing are collected and compared. The comparison shows that those fifteen proverbs are equivalent in meaning but different in form. On the contrary one proverb of English does not have its equivalents in both Indonesian and Mandailing. Two proverbs of Indonesian do not have their equivalents in both English and Mandailing and four proverbs of Mandailing do not have their equivalents in both English and Indonesian.Thus it can be concluded that some proverbs are universal and some others are unique or culture-specific

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Syahron Lubis
PY  - 2019/06
DA  - 2019/06
TI  - The Universality and Uniqueness of Proverb and Its Impact on Translation
BT  - Proceedings of the UNNES International Conference on English Language Teaching, Literature, and Translation (ELTLT 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 267
EP  - 272
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/eltlt-18.2019.53
DO  - 10.2991/eltlt-18.2019.53
ID  - Lubis2019/06
ER  -