East Java Tourism News

Alan Stevens: Author of an exotic language

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.

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