Tipologi kehilangan pragmatik dalam penterjemahan sastera Melayu ke Arab: Satu instrumen penilaian berasaskan model Kesepadanan Koller

[A typology of pragmatic loss in Malay to Arabic literary translation: A Koller-Based Assessment instrument]

Abstract

The number of Malay literary works that have crossed into Arabic remains small, and scholarly evaluation of those translations has so far stopped largely at the lexical level. Failures at the level of communicative intent therefore go undetected, because the instruments in use measure referential accuracy alone. This article shifts evaluation from the lexical to the pragmatic level by constructing a reusable typology of pragmatic loss for the Malay and Arabic language pair. The pragmatic dimension of Koller's equivalence model (1979, 1995) supplies the categories, while Baker's (2018) account of implicature and House's (2015) logic of translation quality assessment convert that dimension from an evaluative concept into a codable construct. A total of 66 pragmatic translation units were drawn from Chapters 1 to 3 of the novel Ustaz by S. Othman Kelantan and its Arabic translation entitled al-Ustaz by Sultan Ahmad bin Abdur and Mujahid Mustafa Bahjat (2010), then analysed through directed qualitative content analysis supported by descriptive statistics. Each unit was coded into one of five loss categories and cross tabulated with translation strategy and degree of loss. Agreement between two coders reached a Cohen's Kappa value of 0.78, and the coding framework was validated by a panel of two experts. The findings show that the flattening of idioms and tropes (KP5) dominates the corpus at 40.9 per cent, and that the literal strategy accounts for 77.8 per cent of all cases of total loss. Lexical proximity between the two languages emerges as a risk rather than an advantage, since it encourages the acceptance of cognate equivalents without verification of current meaning. The instrument is designated the Pragmatic Loss Typology, and is designed to transfer to other language pairs with a long history of lexical borrowing, including Persian and Arabic, Turkish and Arabic, Urdu and Arabic, and Swahili and Arabic. The article contributes an assessment instrument that is both replicable and transferable, alongside the argument that effective cultural mediation depends on the preservation of illocutionary force rather than on denotative accuracy.