Ideological Implication on the Strategy for Translating Cultural Elements in the Harry Potter Series into Malay

Translators make deliberate choices when deciding translation strategies.The choices, among others, are based upon the extent of power the translators have fordecision-making. The choice of translation strategy also reflects upon the status of a sourcetext compared to translated text, as well as the ideological motivation guiding translationactivities at a given time. The tendency in the strategy used by a translator, whethersource or text-oriented, can be determined by investigating how culture-specific items aretranslated. Thus, this study has been carried out to identify the strategy used to translatea phenomenon in modern children’s literature that is the Harry Potter book series, and toanalyse the ideological and power factors that influenced the choice of strategy. Eightyfourculture-specific items have been identified and grouped according to Aixela’s (1996)classification of culture-specific items. The procedures and overall strategy were basedon the translation procedures classification model by Qafzezi (2013) which leverages thetypology of procedures for translating culture-specific items by Ivir (1987) and Venuti’s(2008) framework for translation strategies. The findings show that the translationstrategy used to translate the Harry Potter series into Malay is largely source-oriented.The translator has limited power in deciding the strategy for translating the book series.The study also indicates that there has been a change in the ideological aspect behindchildren’s literature translation activities in Malaysia now compared to the period of postcolonialismin the 1970s and 1980s.