Foreignizing and Domesticating Harry: An Analysis of the Indonesian Translation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’ s Stone

This paper discusses the approaches and techniques used to translate vocatives and culture-specific items (CSIs) in the Indonesian translation of J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The paper identifies a number of translation techniques and considers their effectiveness or otherwise in dealing with the linguistic challenges of translating a humorous children’s story that is embedded in a specific culture. While it is argued that in translating the vocatives the translator’s approach tends towards foreignizing, and in translating the CSIs a more domesticating approach is used, it is acknowledged that a translator’s choice to foreignize or domesticate may be constrained by external circumstances such as publisher’s protocols, the norms and mores of the target culture and ‘the position of children’s books in the literary polysystem’ (Shavit 1981: 172).