Translating English Medical Terms into Indonesian: A Study of Phonological Translation and Spelling Adjustment

This study investigates phonological translation and spelling adjustment as linguistic phenomena in the translation of English medical terms into Indonesian. It aims at identifying the phonological translation and describing spelling adjustment taking place in English-Indonesian medical terms translation. Here, phonological adaptation is specifically discussed to demonstrate the translation of the English terms that are, then, adopted into the Indonesian language through the adjustment of pronunciation. The adjustment can be clearly seen through the comparison of the phonemic transcription of each term. Meanwhile, spelling adjustment presents the adaptation of writing system in accordance with the phonological translation. In Indonesian, the spelling system of the foreign adopted terms is standardized in the Indonesian guidance of term formation. The data are taken from the translation of six selected articles from a medical textbook, General Ophthalmology (2008) that is translated into Oftalmologi Umum (2013). The results demonstrate that phonological translation does occur in the process of translating the English medical terms into Indonesian and the spelling adjustment includes the writing of affix, vowel, vowel combination, vowel-consonant combination as well as consonant combination.