TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

various types of additional information about the execution or the operation
of the law, or referential qualifications (cf. example 2 above), when they
specify the essential inter- or intra-textual nature of the legal provision. The
elements constituting the third type of qualifications mentioned by Bhatia,
i.e. the preparatory qualifications (cf. example 3 above), which describe the
case to which the law applies, is more rarely thematized in the EU
documents, which prefer to formulate these initial case descriptions under
the form of finite conditional or temporal clauses. I can conclude, therefore,
that the producers of the texts resort to this solution whenever they consider
it important to provide a point of orientation in understanding the terms of
the law in question, before the legislative provision proper is actually
formulated.
All the examples offered so far clearly indicate that the Romanian
variants of the EU documents tend to preserve the themes present in the
original texts, thus contributing to the maintenance of a coherent point of
view at the level of the translations in question. However, the comparative
analysis of the English and the Romanian texts making up my corpus led to
the identification of certain differences between the thematic structure of the
translated documents and that of their originals. In most such situations, the
translator’s modification of the original theme-rheme pattern does not seem
to have any objective justification, its result often being changes in focus or
contrast at the level of the document in question, as it is the case of the two
examples offered below:
(1) ST: “Under no circumstances may a foreign judgment be reviewed as to its
substance.”
TT: “Hotărârea străină nu poate face în nici o situaţie obiectul unei revizuiri de
fond.”
(32001R0044)
(2) ST: “Member States shall, following consultation with social partners in
accordance with national law and practice, lay down practical guidelines for the
determination of sporadic and low-intensity exposure …”
TT: “După consultarea partenerilor sociali, în conformitate cu legile şi
practicile naţionale, statele membre enunţă directive practice pentru definirea
expunerilor sporadice şi a expunerilor de mică intensitate …”
(32003L0018)