THE DIFFICULTIES OF USING
TRANSLATING IDIOMS ENGLISH-INDONESIA IN UNIVERSITY
STUDENTS
Definition of Idiom
One of the most important aspects of English is
idioms. They are frequently used in a wide variety of situations, from friendly
conversations and business meetings to more formal and written contexts. An
idiom is a group of words which has, as a whole, a different meaning from the
meaning of its constituents (The Longman Pocket Dictionary: 2001). In other
words, the meaning of the idiomatic expression is not the sum of the words
taken individually.
According to Redman’s theory (2002: halaman 40), “an
idiom is a group of words with a meaning that is different from the individual words and often difficult to
understand from the individual words”. Abel (2003 halaman 329-358) defines
idioms as phrases or sentences whose figurative meaning is not clear from the
literal meaning of their individual constituents.
Gillett, (2004 halaman 129) Idioms are a cluster of
words or phrases that have a meaning of their own peculiar to that language.
For example, we have said above that learning English with us will be a piece
of cake - now, you cannot take the meaning of "a piece of cake" in
the literal sense; you have to understand it in the idiomatic sense, in which
it means "easy" an idiom is a kind of complex lexical item. It is a
phrase whose meaning
cannot be predicted
from the meanings
of the morphemes
it comprises tically like a single word, it doesn’t function like one. A
large number of idioms contain a verb and a noun, but although the verb may be
placed in the past tense, the number of the noun can never be changed”, for
instance, the expressions ‟kick the bucket‟ and „kicked the bucket‟ (someone
who dies) are largely used in English, in contrast to „kick the buckets‟ which
never occurs.
