ABSTRACT

It is fact that students of SMP Yapenas Gempol Pasuruan do not have

similar abilities to use English. Some of them have excellent in mastering English
knowledge and acquire sufficient skills of using the English. However, some other
still have difficulties to achieve the expected mastery and skills.
Based on the above-mentioned, the writer would like to know for sure the
causes of those weaknesses. However, it is quite hard for her to conduct a study
that involves all language components and skills. Therefore, she only specifies her
study on one skill of language and one language component, namely reading and
translation. In this case, she studies the correlation between reading
comprehension and translation ability.
The problem to be studied in this research is whether there is significant
correlation between reading comprehension and translation ability. The discussion
does not go too far beyond the topic; the writer feels that it is necessary to
determine a limitation of the scope. This study does not discuss the detailed
causes of the students inability to deal with reading comprehension. The main
concern is the correlation of the two variables to be measured namely reading and
translation ability.
After deciding some assumptions as the foundation of the study, the writer
decides a hypothesis. There is a significant correlation between the students
mastery in reading comprehension and their achievement in translation ability. In
other words, final tests are the instruments that are used in this study. The
operational hypothesis is The students who obtain high scores in reading
comprehension test will also acquire high translation test, on the contrary, those
who get low scores in reading comprehension test will also get low scores in
doing translation test.
The subjects of this study consist of 43 students of the third grade of SMP
Yapenas Gempol exactly in IX-B and IX-D, who are selected at random. To check
whether the two instruments are good or not, the writer has been given the scores
of the final tests from the teacher who teaches those subjects.
The result of the data analysis which uses Pearsons Product Moment
Correlation Formula show that the correlations score is 0,351 between the two
variables so the null hypothesis that has been decided by the writer is rejected.
This can be interpreted and concluded that reading comprehension has positive
influence to translation ability.

Key words: correlation, reading comprehension, translation ability