Yuen, Sze Wan (2013) A systemic functional approach to the analysis of tense in Sherlock Holmes’ stories and their translations / Yuen Sze Wan. Masters thesis, University of Malaya.
Abstract
The systems of tense, as in the ways of correlating time in connection with the occurrence of events/states is different in the English and Malay language. As the English language utilizes tense to make back and forth references to the past and future, the Malay language is a tenseless language as “Malay does not have a system of tense” (Asmah Haji Omar, 2000, p.97). This grammatical system leads to differences in terms of how time and the occurrence of states/events are expressed in the two languages. Although research on tense in translated texts have been prevalent (Zawaiyah, 2009, Xiao and McEnery, 2002) little interest has been shown in utilizing functional linguistics to analyze tense in translated texts from English to Malay. This study investigates the usage of past tense and future events in two stories of Sherlock Holmes and their respective translations in Malay using the framework of past tense and future events by Downing and Locke (2006) based on M.A.K. Halliday’s functional approach to language. The findings reveal that for both stories in English, the past tense is utilized most frequently for references to events/states which happened solely in the past while future events is employed frequently to refer to predictions made for the future. Conversely, in the Malay translations, the findings show that “sudah” and “telah” are used to depict past states/events while “akan” is utilized to indicate future time events. The study also shows that the Malay translated stories utilized lexical and phrases such as “tadi” meaning “earlier”, “sekiranya” and “seandainya” meaning “if”, “kata” and “katanya” meaning “said” as a substantiation for the absence of a referent for the past tense. Meanwhile, the usage of context, lexical and phrases such as “esok” meaning “tomorrow” and “sehari dua ini” meaning “these two days” complimented for the absence of a referent for the future events. It is hoped that the current study is able to provide insights on the resources used in the expression of past tense and future events whereby the tense structure is absent in the translated language.
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