Awareness of Primary and Secondary Meaning in Translation and its implication on reading course: a beginner’s Indonesian context

Abstract

In communication, be it through graphic (visual, written) or sound (audio, spoken) channel, requires a stock of sufficient amount of words. English as one of the means of communication is taught in Indonesia schools as a mandatory subject from junior to senior high school. As the process of learning goes, students need to expand the vocabulary so as to move from the primary meaning, one they get when they first encounter a word, to the secondary one, other meaning of a word as a result of being used in different context or other different grammatical posisition. This is very important especially when they have to develop their transaltion skill where they may have to cope with words used in context different from the one they usuall encounter which only requires the knowledge of the primary meaning of a word. For this to happen, students need to be exposed to a wide variety of texts in which words familiar to them are used in different context with different lexical and grammatical meaning. Therefore, the teaching and learning process should provide students with awareness of the context a certain text is in which result in the ability to choose meaning. This abiltity will in turn enable them to give the accurate and natural translation