Translation of the Military Terms in The Book “Art of War by Sun Zi”

Abstract

This study examines the translation of military terms in the classic Chinese book "Art of War by Sun Zi" from Mandarin Chinese into Indonesian. The focus of this research is to evaluate the accuracy, acceptability, and readability of the translation. The evaluation method is based on a theoretical framework that considers accuracy reflecting the correspondence between the original text and its translation, acceptability referring to the norms and rules of the target language, and readability assessing the ease of understanding the translated text. The results of this study are expected to provide a deeper understanding of the challenges in transferring cultural values and thoughts from the source language to the target language, particularly in the context of classical military literature. The findings indicate that first, the assessment of translation quality yields a comprehensive evaluation of the translation work. Second, the quality of the "Art of War by Sun Zi" translation in terms of accuracy, the translation achieves 22.45% accuracy, 18.37% moderate accuracy, and 21.43% inaccuracy. Regarding acceptability, 24.49% of translations were deemed acceptable, 18.37% moderately acceptable, and 15.31% not acceptable. In terms of readability, high readability was achieved at 47.96%, moderate readability at 12.24%, and low readability at 7.14%.