Indonesia plans to increase its cotton production to 70,000 tons in 2010 to reduce its dependencw on imports, Director General of Plantations Achmad Manggabarani said here on Monday.
He said domestic need for cotton at present reached 550,000 tons a year but only 5,000 tons of it could be met by domestic production and the rest had to be met with imports.
“To meet the production target we plan to open 50,000 hectares of cotton plantations until 2010 and raise productivity to 1.4 tons per hectare,” he said.
He said at present productivity of cotton plantations in Indonesia reachied only 0.6 tons per hectare because the seeds the farmers used were of low quality.
The cotton plantation development program would be implemented in 55 districts in seven provinces, namely Central Java, East Java, Yogyakarta, Bali, East Nusa Tenggara and South Sulawesi.
At a production rate of 70,000 tons a year, national cotton plantations` contribution to the domestic textile industry and textile production would reach 4.7 percent or up 0.5 percent from the present level.
In 2006, cotton plantation development reached 8,980 hectares producing 4,191 tons of raw cotton equivalent to 1,397 tons of processed cotton to contribute 0.3 percent to the textile industry and textile production.
Manggabarani said three companies would be involved in the development of cotton, namely PT Nusa Farm in West Nusa Tenggara, PT Sukun in East Java, Central Java, Yogyakarta and Bali and PT Sebo Fajar in South Sulawesi.
The president director of PT Ade Agroindustry, Ii` Tjahyadi, said the textile industry needed a large quantity of long-fiber cotton. “The seeds are mostly imported and the resulte are good,” he said.
He said the country actually had large potentials for cotton plantation development but it still had yet to overcome irrigation problems because the plantations were located on marginal land.
Commenting on the irrigation problem, director of water management of the directorate of water and land management of the ministry of agriculture, Gator Irianto, said his office would strive to exploit water sources from shallow and surface water supply for cotton plantations.
“We will use local equipment for easy operation by local farmers ,” he said.
Jakarta (ANTARA News)
May 18th, 2007
The tall, white-haired man smiled as he signed the copy of Kamus Lengkap Indonesia-Inggris (The Comprehensive Indonesian-English Dictionary).
“I was paid 5 cent an hours for making this dictionary,” Alan Stevens, a professional translator and retired linguistics professor at City University of New York, later said.
He was not joking.
It took Alan and his colleague, A. Schmidgall-Tellings, more than 20 years to produce the 1,103-page dictionary, which hit the market here last year.
“I did it for my beloved Indonesia,” said Alan, who looks much younger than his age of 72.
He expressed his feelings about the country during his brief visit here early last month to attend a meeting of professional translators grouped in the Bahtera mailing list that unexpectedly became an unofficial book-signing event.
His affection for the country was reflected his brown batik shirt, which suited him. Alan, who visits the country every few years, has spent much time in Indonesia.
He studied French at Columbia University, where he got his bachelor of arts degree in 1956, before he went to Yale University to do South East Asian Studies.
“You have to study an exotic language,” Alan recalled his professor telling him in 1960.
Alan could have learned Chinese or Vietnamese, but he picked Indonesian, which he found quite interesting, and decided to leave the United States for Indonesia, a country he had never been to before.
It turned out that Alan loved not only Indonesian, but also Madurese. The phonology and morphology of the language spoken by people living in Madura, an island off Surabaya in East Java, became the object of his research.
Alan obtained his PhD degree in linguistics, Indonesian, from Yale in 1964 and began to teach at City University of New York. Unfortunately, only as few as five people were interested in studying the language. “Indonesia is so far away…,” he reasoned.
He later came to Malang, where he taught English at the Teachers’ Training Institute. The local flavor strongly affected not only Alan, but also his little son, who spent his childhood among locals.
“One day he came to me and asked opo iki (the Javanese for ‘what’s this’)?” Alan recalled with a big smile.
Alan was director of the summer program in advanced Indonesian language study in Malang, East Java, from 1979 to 1992.
He was also an adjunct professor of Indonesian, at the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at Columbia University, from 1987-1992. He later became the professor of linguistics at the City University of New York and a member of Graduate Faculty, City University of New York Graduate Center, before he retired in 2004. He is now focusing on his Indonesian and Malaysian translation services, translating, interpreting, editing and proofreading.
Translating is difficult. Many people, even those claiming to be professional translators often make many mistakes, says Alan, who has more than 25 years experience in translating, editing, and proofreading.
A good translation needs two people, one the native speaker of the target language who knows the source language and the other a native speaker of the source language who knows the target language.
Expertise in grammar is not a guarantee of a good translation. Alan gave an example, telling the story of a Sweden vacuum cleaner producer who, in its advertising campaign, said: “Nothing sucks like this”. This is grammatically correct, but anyone who knows the language well will immediately know that there is something wrong with the ad.
There is no doubt that Alan knows a great deal about Indonesian, as demonstrated by his dictionary. Even though it is called The Indonesian-English Dictionary, Alan goes beyond.
“It is a compilation of all the roots, words, phrases, proverbs, idioms, compounds, and derivatives that the authors have found in written and spoken Indonesian,” Alan says in the preface of the dictionary.
The completeness of the entries might surprise many. For example, you will find the word katro, which is today widely used by many people here as it is a favorite of Tukul Arwana, the host of a popular TV talk show Empat Mata (Four Eyes or Face to Face), to tease the audience.
According to the dictionary, katro, derived from Javanese, or kampungan means 1) behind the times, conservative, 2) unmannerly, ill-bred, a hick.
Relatively new terms are also to found in the dictionary, such as pasar kaget: small market without a permanent location and goyang ngebor: gyrations, erotic hip movements, and even abbreviations or short terms such as jjs (jalan jalan santai/sore or to hang out, take a stroll) KKN (korupsi, kolusi dan nepotisme): corruption, collusion and nepotism, pungli (pungutan liar): illegal fee and gepeng (gelandangan dan pengemis): homeless drifters and panhandlers.
Other entries you might not expect, and you might not know, even if you are an Indonesian, include denai: trail, spoor, track of a wild animal in the forest or jungle; husada: medicine, health and jangat: skin (of human or animal body), dermis.
The last Indonesian-English dictionary, compiled by John M. Echols and Hassan Shadily, and was first published in 1961.
Alan’s dictionary was first printed by Ohio University Press in August 2004, with a second printing in 2005. In Jakarta, the dictionary was published by Mizan.
Co-author Schmidgall-Tellings, who had a Dutch father and Javanese mother, died in 1997 after working with Alan for more than two decades to produce the dictionary.
Asked about his difficulties in compiling the dictionary, Alan said: “The difficulty was that it took much time.”
“But I am satisfied with the publication of this dictionary,” he said.
May 18th, 2007