Visual Analogy as a Transcreation Strategy for the Decoding of Javanese Kris Terminology

Abstract

Museums in Indonesia often provide culturally distinctive terminology in their collection labels and storylines due to their typical local artifacts, such as kris and other traditional Javanese weapons. Kris museums having a target to recognize themselves internationally should provide English translation of their collection labels and storylines as a prime need to facilitate communication between the museums and their foreign visitors. The task of providing them becomes a forceful effort to translators due to the challenges in transferring the meaning of local terminology into English, which potentially lead to a communication gap. This study addresses the use of visual analogy as a transcreation strategy to empower the English translation of kris terminology within museum labels and storylines for traditional Javanese weapons on showcase at the Indonesian Kris Museum. This study utilizes Goldschmidt’s (2001) linguistic approach to examine the use of visual analogy, form, and shape characteristics as a transcreation strategy for translating kris terminology. Further analysis of the strategy uses Greenberg’s theory to identify its syntactic and semantic typology. The findings reveal that four types of syntactic typology pinning the realization of visual analogy in the English translation of kris terminology are like, that/which looks like, shaped like, and that is similar to. Those syntactic linguistic comparative signifiers of visual analogy are often followed by description of the object’s shape, size, position, and condition. Another finding is related to semantic typology that could be grouped into parallelization, generalization, and juxtaposition.