SEMANTIC SHIFT IN TRANSLATING
R. Tantie Kustiantie
The meaning shift which occurs in the effort of transferring message from the source language to the target language is called as semantic shift. This shift happened because of two things. First there are differences in point of view and in the culture of speaker of the languages. Second, sometimes the equivalent word can’t be found in the source language. The specific meaning in source language has no exact equivalent word in target language so the translator uses words which have broader scope of meaning. Consequently, the meaning in the source language can’t be always re-expressed in the target language wholly and accurately.
As Simatupang quotes Vinay: La transmission originale du message perd tujours queque chose en traduction (In transferring message from source language into target language, there is always lost message). Therefore, semantic shift based on two things, that are point of view/ modulation and scope (semantic field). Let me give you an example that taken from Pengantar Teori Terjemahan written by Maurits D.S Simatupang : English people relate the space with the depths while Indonesian people relate the space with distance/remoteness, so the two different nations has different point of view. Therefore the sentence: The space-ship travelled deep into space, would be expressed by Indonesian people as follow : Kapal (the spaceship) melakukan perjalanan ( travelled) jauh (far away) ke (into) ruang angkasa (space). The sentence is transferred into Indonesian language with the different point of view.
I will take other sample sentence which use modulation as translation technique. When I translate Winning The Money Game written by Sean Seah, I found a bit trouble to translate phrase Driving Traffic in the sentence: Marketing a website is commonly known as Driving Traffic. The phrase has specific meaning, one of the meaning traffic as Oxford Dictionary explain is the movement of ships or aircraft, meanwhile in that sentence traffic mean the crowd of people who visit our website. Therefore, the traffic can be translated into “lalu lintas” or “peselancar Internet (surfer of Internet)”. After discussed with my friend through mailing list of Bahtera, instead of “lalu lintas” I decided to use “peselancar Internet” because I would like the specific word to explain the term accurately and readable. In this case, when I do translating, I change point of view that is seeing traffic as people who move rather than movement of people. In the translation of the sentence above we also find other semantic shift that is semantic field because “peselancar Internet” has narrower scope than “traffic”. So the sentence above transferred into Indonesia as follow: Memasarkan situs umum dikenal sebagai Mengarahkan Peselancar Internet (Driving Traffic).
As previously mentioned the existence of modulation has closed relation with culture. I think the different culture causes the lost message in translation. We will see the lost message clearly in the translation of following sentence: Throngs of educator, lemming like, line-up to wire their school. The phrase lemming-like would be meaningless for Indonesian people if translated literally into seperti binatang lemming because Indonesia people has no idea what the lemming is, there is nuance failed to be conveyed. The sentence quoted from High-Tech Heretic : Reflections of a Computer Contrarian written by Clifford Stoll. According to Oxford lemming is a small animal like mouse that live in cold northern countries. Sometimes large groups of lemmings migrate in search of food. Many of them die on the journey and there is popular belief that lemmings kill themselves by jumping off cliffs. Based on that explanation we know that the author use the characteristic of lemming to described educator’s behavior in the effort of equipping their school with Internet of computer technology (to wire up their school). So I translate the sentence into Indonesia as follow: Para pendidik berebut saling mendahului (lemming-like) untuk terlibat dalam pembangunan jaringan di sekolah mereka. Still some message lost, that is the author’s intention to stress the predicable disaster faced by educator in deciding build computer technology at all cost. Building computer need huge fund, educator allocate the fund which should be employed to finance other equipment such as chemistry laboratory or library. This blindly action taken by educator perfectly described by author by using metaphor lemming-like that unfortunately unknown by reader of target language so that the translation do not cover all the semantic field carried by the original sentence.
We may conclude that semantic shift virtually occur in translating all cultural word, either based on modulation or semantic field. Modulation is important translation technique that generates change in the point of view of the message without altering meaning and without arising sense of awkwardness in the target language reader.
