AUTHENTICITY AND READABILITY OF GOOGLE TRANSLATE TRANSLATING RELIGIOUS TEXTS RELATED TO CHARACTER EDUCATION WRITTEN IN ENGLISH INTO INDONESIAN

Abstract

Character education and information and communications technology (ICT) cannot be separated in discussing the Indonesian students in the post-millennial era. In this research, what is meant by character education is the religious teaching in the Holy Quran, whereas what is meant by ICT is the translation machine named Google Translate. The Holy Quran in this research is one which is translated from Arabic into English by Abdullah Yusuf Ali. The character education of the Holy Quran usually refers to the verses of Al Luqman, and the studies investigating the work of Google Translate usually concern the scientific texts and information or news. Different from the previous studies, this research do not investigate the verses of Al Luqman nor the scientific and informative ones. The aims of this research are to observe the religious texts belonging to the Holy Quran translated into English which contain universal character education and to investigate the authenticity and readability of the work of Google Translate translating such texts. The method employed in conducting this research is Mixed Method proposed by Hesse-Biber. Besides, the triangulation approach proposed by Turner is used. Thus, the researcher not only making use of the official Holy Quran of Ministry of Religious Affairs, but also involving both the lecturers of Islam Religion and of Bahasa Indonesia. This research found that the character education which is universal in nature could be read in the Holy Quran not only in Sura Al Luqman but also in Sura Al Furqon verses 63-77. Qualitatively the Google Translate work translating Sura Al Furqon verses 63-77 underwent the meaning distortion due to the Indonesian sentences whose both cohesion and coherence were violated. Meanwhile, quantitatively, it was found that 40% of the verses examined could be categorized unreadable or incomprehensible and that 60% of the verses examined could be categorized as undergoing the meaning distortion.