Member of the Month: Elsa Sasa

Elsa Sasa is a third-semester student of Diponegoro University in the English Department, focusing on Linguistics. She achieved the highest score on the National Exam in Regency Level for Social Program in 2015. She loves reading and spending her leisure time in her room. Translating poems is one of her hobbies. She consults a corpus when translating; by knowing about corpus data, she can understand the use of words in the wider context. Both corpus data and translation have an important relation as a translation will be more accurate if it is complemented by corpus data as its reference.

Herewith her opinion about the Indonesian Oxford Living Dictionary.


Being a part of it is an awesome thing as I learn how to translate a new word which is not present in English using several methods. By joining the Indonesian living dictionary community, I understand that many unique words in Indonesian don’t have perfect equivalence in English. We can suggest equivalence(s) and express the translation so that certain expressions in the target language have similar meanings to the ones of the source language.


It is easier for Indonesian speakers to retrieve words and equivalences as the expressions in the target language (English) are already provided.


Begadang. I have a bad habit to stay up every night for I prefer to do all my task and studying in the late evening. I am in love with the ambience of nights. It is quiet and good enough to get more focused. Begadang does not have one-word equivalence in English. Begadang is translated as “staying awake”.


I suggest a feature to show additional information in each translation, e.g. more example sentences and a note about certain collocations.


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