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Stretching experiments on sheets of nematic elastomers have revealed soft deformation modes and formation of microstructure in parts of the sample. Both phenomena are manifestations of the existence of a symmetry-breaking phase transformation from a random, isotropic phase to an aligned, nematic phase. The microscopic energy proposed by Bladon et al. (Phys. Rev. E 47 (1993), R 3838) to model this transition delivers a continuum of symmetry-related zero-energy states, which can be combined in different ways to achieve a variety of zero-energy macroscopic deformations. We replace the microscopic energy with a macroscopic effective energy, the so-called quasiconvexification. This procedure yields a coarse-grained description of the physics of the system, with (energetically optimal) fine-scale oscillations of the state variables correctly accounted for in the energetics, but averaged out in the kinematics …