TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

DISCOURSAL NORMS IN TRANSLATION: THE THEMATIC
ORGANIZATION OF THE EU LEGISLATION AS A CASE STUDY
1. Introduction
MIHAELA COZMA
University of Timişoara
It is generally acknowledged that the success of any translation
process involves more than finding correct target-language equivalents for
the syntactic and lexico-semantic patterns contained by the original text.
The production of an appropriate target text is also determined by the
manner in which the translator deals with the discoursal features revealed by
the source variant.
One of the discoursal features which may cause serious problems of
translation concerns the thematic organization of a text. This feature
represents the focus of the present paper, and it will be discussed in relation
to a category of texts whose translation is of great interest in the context of
the present-day Romanian culture, namely the EU legislation. The purpose
of this paper is to identify the types of themes and rhemes predominantly
used in the English variants of the EU documents, on the one hand, and in
their Romanian counterparts, on the other, with a view to pointing to some
of the translation problems which the translators of such texts might
encounter from this point of view. In order to achieve this purpose, I
analyzed a corpus of 30 EU texts written in English (cf.
http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/lex/en/index.htm), as well as their official
Romanian translations (cf. http://www.ier.ro). I must also mention that I
mainly used a qualitative type of research, and not a quantitative one,
because my intention was to arrive at findings that might prove relevant for
the type of discoursal norms valid for the translation of this category of
texts, and not to produce statistics on the features present in the analyzed
documents.
In very simple terms, the concepts of theme and rheme have to do
with the role played by the linear arrangement of linguistic elements in the
organization of messages at text level. From this perspective, word order is
perceived as a textual strategy rather than as a grammatical feature (cf.
Baker, 1992: 119). The theme-rheme distinction is based on the assumption
that, even if speakers and writers have numerous syntactic forms available