Introduction
When I started my career as a book translator, the first advice from a chief editor was that the translated books should be easy enough for even middle school students. I tried to render sentences easy and simple as much as possible while trying not to lose the original meaning. But still the proofreading from the editor always frustrated me. She revised even the simplest sentence that I thought could not become simpler. But later I noticed a pattern in the proofreading. She had been re-wording, but with a rule, which was unpacking the nominalized words. The editor believed that Korean readers prefer unpacked sentences to nominalized words. In this blog post series, I want to show what implications this nominalization has on English-Korean translation. I am going to use Systemic Function Grammar, particularly framework of Grammatical Metaphor to explain this nominalisation phenomenon in languages and translation. In the first post, let me introduce the concept of grammatical metaphor and some terminology that I will use throughout the posts.
What is Grammatical Metaphor?
Nominalisation is uniquely explained in terms of metaphor by systemic functional linguists, which is grammatical metaphor. It was first put forwarded by Michael Halliday in 1985. Together with lexical metaphor, grammatical metaphor is viewed as an important resource to expand the language potential.
As a consequence of having grammar, one meaning can be expressed in grammatically different ways. That is, the same meaning can be expressed in typical, unmarked way or atypical, marked way.
For example, 'They applauded loudly' can be expressed as 'they applauded thunderously' or 'they gave a loud applause'. The first sentence shows an example of lexical metaphor, while the second sentence shows grammatical metaphor. The two metaphors are different in terms of the location where the transfer occurs. Lexical metaphor changes expressions on the word level ('thunderously'), whereas grammatical metaphor changes the grammatical structure ('applaud loudly' was nominalised to 'a laud applause'). In other words, grammatical metaphor is the process where a meaning is reconstrued in different grammatical structures.
Agnates and Congruency
These grammatically different configurations as a result of metaphor are called 'agnates/agnate forms' and these agnates exist on the continuum between the least metaphorical form (called as congruent = expressed in typical, unmarked way) and the most metaphorical form (incongruent = atypical, marked way).
And along this continuum, metaphorical realisations can be 'packed' or 'unpacked' into more or less congruent agnate forms. That is, incongruent expressions can be unpacked into congruent expressions. Having said that, it is worth noting that congruency is not an absolute term but a matter of degree and an expression can be unpacked differently depending on the age of target readers as follows.
The truest confirmation of the accuracy of our knowledge is the effectiveness of our actions.
Age 15: The fact that our knowledge is best confirmed by the fact that our actions are effective.
Age 12: What proves that we know things accurately is the fact that we can act effectively.
Age 9: The best way of telling that we know what's happening is to see that what we do is working.
(Examples extracted and adjusted from Halliday and Matthiessen)
Nominalisation as a grammatical metaphor
According to Halliday, 'variation in the expression of meaning' is not just simply lexical, but lexico-grammatical. Simply put, grammatical metaphor is about replacing on grammatical class or structure with another. Grammatical metaphor is probably found nearly all languages but preferred degree of metaphorisation could vary among the languages as I indirectly experienced when translating English to Korean.
The example shown above is a typical case of nominalisation as a type of grammatical metaphor. Nominalisation can pose a translation challenge when two languages do not share preferred degree of metaphorisation.
Conclusion
In this post, I briefly covered the definition of grammatical metaphor as a framework of comparing two languages before I delve into analysing translation problems that could arise from the difference between English and Korean. In the next post, I am going to explain grammatical metaphor further by covering three types of grammatical metaphor and nominalisation as a grammatical metaphor.