Demetaphorization in the Translation of Meditation Text

Abstract

This study deals with demetaphorization in the translation of meditation text from Indonesian into English. Meditation text whose goal is to persuade other people to some extent conveys its persuasive meaning in metaphorical grammatical constructions. Drawing Halliday and Matthiessen's (2014) transitivity structure, Halliday's (2009) grammatical metaphor and House's (2015) translation as re-contextualization, this study focuses on the types of ideational grammatical metaphor as non-congruent ways of representing experience of the world found in Indonesian text of meditation and how they are manipulated in English to create a specific effect on the speakers of English. The result shows that metaphorical constructions found in Indonesian text of meditation include deverbalization in the form of nominalization and verbalization. Based on the underlying process, the types of nominalization found include: 1) nominalization of implied material/action process; 2) nominalization of implied relational process; 3) nominalization of implied mental process and 4) nominalization of implied behavioral process. In its translation, these types of nominalization are demetaphorized and rendered by a more expansively English construction. The implied process which is implicit in Indonesian is made explicit in English. Metaphorical constructions of verbalization found show that adjectives and noun are reworded as process. When they are translated into English, they are demetaphorized that adjectives are used to construe quality and noun to construe entity. By this nonmetaphorical construction, the English texts become more explicit and more direct.