Grammatical Metaphorizing in SFL and Its Implication in English-Korean Translation

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to show that there is a difference in degree of grammatical “metaphorizing” in Systemic Functional Linguistics(SFL) between English and Korean texts, which is shown in the translations from English into Korean texts. The followings are discussed in this paper. First, the low frequency of the use of grammatical metaphor(GM) constructions in Korean translations may be due to the strong animacy constraint in Korean. Second, ideational GMs in English are canonically translated with the congruent realizations and clause complexes in Korean translations. Third, we need to broaden the research domains of GM and to deal with both ideational and interpersonal GM phenomena in English and Korean. It is shown that the same translational tendency is observed for the English-into-Korean translations of interpersonal GMs. Given Goddard’s(2011) suggestion for the “metaphorizing” differences between languages, Korean translations are expected to show less instances of GM constructions than their English source texts, considering the typological distinction between object dominant languages(as in English) and action dominant languages(as in Korean). The expectation is shown to be true of English-into-Korean translations.