Thematic organization in parallel texts: Same and different methods of development

Abstract

Recent studies of a text in one language and its translation in another (parallel texts) have revealed many syntactic, semantic, and discoursal similarities and differences that can be focused upon in preparing bilingual dictionaries, material for machine translation, and teaching translation methods to university students. To our knowledge, no one has yet analyzed the thematic organization or 'method of development' of parallel texts quantitatively. The present study looked at the thematic development of one text type in English (the source language) and the corresponding translations in Chinese (the target language). For this investigation, Halliday's (1994) categories for theme classification in English were used with some modification. The findings based on a statistical analysis indicate that despite a significant difference in the number of clauses for the parallel texts in the two languages, there is a highly significant correlation between the themes in English texts and their Chinese translations in terms of the assigned theme features and theme patterns selected. Finally some implications of the findings for teaching patterns of thematic choice and strategies used will be discussed with regard to teaching translation and establishing registers/text types across languages.