THE DIFFICULTIES OF STUDENTS AT THE SECOND YEAR OF SMA St. THOMAS 3 MEDAN IN TRANSLATING ENGLISH IDIOMS INTO INDONESIAN

This study deals with the difficulties of students at the second year of SMA St. Thomas 3Medan in translating idioms English-Indonesian. The objective of this study is to find outthe students’ difficulties in translating idioms from English to Indonesian. The sample ofthis study was the students of class XI IPA-2 SMA St. Thomas 3 Medan. This study useddescriptive qualitative research. The data were collected by giving a test which consists of35 items of English idioms that must be translated to Indonesian. Based on the dataanalysis, the students’ difficulties generally are mostly caused by lacking of vocabulariesso they were no able to understand the meaning clearly. Another students’ difficulties arein understanding the context of the sentence in each items, guessing the exact meaning ofan idiom in the sentence, and also in choosing an appropriate diction to replace the wordof an idiom. The result of this study showed that the second year students of SMA St.Thomas 3 Medan have some difficulties in translating idioms from English to Indonesian.They need more teaching about the way of translating and the teacher should give moreattention to train the students in translating idioms.