Indonesian Mental Clause and Its Translation Directions in English

Abstract

Mental clause, as a grammatical realization used to express experience of our
consciousness of the world, is commonly found in the text of meditation. This type of text is
written to persuade people to act in a particular way as suggested by the speaker or writer. This
research is aimed at exploring how the mental clause in Indonesian text is re-contextualized to
convey the same meaning in English. The source language text is a text of meditation entitled
Butir-Butir Kebijaksanaan: Titian Hidup Sehat dengan Meditasi Bio-Energi Ratu Bagus (Ida
Pandita Mpu Nabe Parama Daksa Natha Ratu Bagus, 2012) and the target language text is its
translation entitled Pearls of Wisdom: The Path of a Healthy Life with Ratu Bagus Bio-Energy
Meditation (Stacey, 2014). Knowing that translation is re-contextualization (House, 2015) and
using Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014) and translation strategies
(Malone, 1988) as the main theories, this study focuses on the directions of the translation of the
mental clause from Indonesian into English and on the translation strategies leading to the
directions. The research result shows that the mental clause of the Indonesian text can be
rendered into various clause types, including mental clause and non-mental clause. It can also be
rendered into a form of nominalization. The strategies which condition the directions include the
strategies of equation, reordering, diffusion and condensation.