Thematic structure and translation: A case study of the translation of English news into Persian

Abstract

Thematic structure is considered as one of the elements of discourse that can be explored especially in the process of translation. Therefore, this study was an attempt to investigate and analyze the thematic structure of English news and their Persian translated version exploiting both descriptive and quantitative approaches. Correspondingly, 1000 clauses in English and 1095 translated clauses in Persian were collected from the University of Tehran Persian-English Comparable Corpus (UTPECC). Then, the extracted data were analyzed adopting Halliday and Matthiessen's (2014) classification of thematic structure. The results of the Chi-square test highlighted a significant difference between various theme types in both corpora except for topical, multiple, elided and interpersonal-topical themes. Moreover, the results were calibrated with a descriptive analysis of the clauses of both corpora showing that there were two major alterations to the thematic structure in the process of translation including changing of themes into rhemes or vice versa as a general trend which realized through some structural procedures. All the structural procedures and a significant difference between the theme types in both corpora showed that the canonical form of Persian structure was preferred over keeping the English thematic structure in the translation of English news text into Persian.