The Impact of Transposition on Grammatical Metaphor: A Study of Translation from the Perspective of SFL Theory

Abstract

There are five major translation procedures generally adopted for translation practice: transposition, modulation, adaptation, equivalence with context, and equivalence with a note ( Machali, 2009:92). Transposition or shift (Catford, 1965), however, is one of translation procedures unavoidable to attain the equivalence between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). It is a procedure of changing grammatical forms from SL to TL. This paper is aimed to explore the impact of applying transposition viewed from Systemic Functional Language (SFL)Theory (Halliday, 1994) by which language is considered as designed: (i) to understand the environment or build experience, and (ii) to act on the others. Here the clause plays a central role where the reality is made up of processes: material, mental, and relational. Based on the notion of metaphor as the variation in the expression of meanings, metaphorical variation is lexicogrammatical rather than simply lexical (Halliday, 1994:341). This analysis shows that adoption of transposition has potential to change such processes. Consequently, a metaphorical clause may change into a congruent (non-metaphorical) one due to such a translation procedure. The examples of clauses with grammatical metaphors used in this study are taken from The Book of Psalm (Kitab Mazmur ) : English version is considered as SL and Indonesian version as TL. The result of analysis is that: (i) all procedures have potential (not always) to change a metaphorical clause in SL into congruent one in TL, (ii) transposition has a great potential to change metaphorical clauses into congruent ones. Based on the result of this study, it may be concluded that SFL theory can be adopted as a theoretical ground for translation study, and so as a tool of analysis in the praxis of translation. Transposition, from the view of SFL, not only the shift of structure but also the change of grammatical process.