Interkoneksi Ilmu Semantik Dengan Praktik Penerjemahan Bahasa Arab-Indonesia Dan Indonesia-Arab

Abstract

Translation between Arabic and Indonesian is a linguistic activity that requires more than lexical knowledge. Translators must identify the intended meaning of the source text, examine relations among linguistic units, interpret contextual information, and consider the cultural background embedded in the text. This article provides an in-depth discussion of the relationship between semantics and Arabic-Indonesian as well as Indonesian-Arabic translation practices. The study employs a qualitative descriptive approach based on library research and linguistic analysis. The discussion covers lexical and grammatical meaning, polysemy, synonymy, homonymy, semantic change, collocation, contextual meaning, idioms, metaphors, cultural-religious terms, and translation equivalence. The analysis demonstrates that the central difficulty of translation does not lie merely in finding word equivalents, but in identifying the units of meaning that need to be transferred into the target language. In Arabic-Indonesian translation, this difficulty is influenced by derivational morphology, inflection, extensive polysemy, and terminology rooted in Arab-Islamic traditions. In the opposite direction, Indonesian-Arabic translation is often complicated by the fact that a single Indonesian lexical item may cover several concepts that are lexicalized differently in Arabic. Semantic analysis should therefore be positioned at the core of translation: identifying meaning, testing candidate equivalents, and evaluating the resulting correspondence.