TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

Thematic shifts of this type are, most probably, determined by the
Romanian translators’ efforts towards using a word order that meets the
double objective of clarity and naturalness in the target language. In the vast
majority of cases, such changes of the original themes do not affect the
meaning or the comprehensibility of the utterance in question, leading only
to a slight difference of impact.
It must be noted that the texts analyzed also reveal situations when
the translator’s change in the thematic structure of the source text is
determined by the fact that the preservation of the original word order would
result into an unusual target-language structure. The most frequent cases of
this type are represented by Romanian sentences and clauses in which the
theme position is occupied by the Predicate or, more specifically, by the
whole verb phrase. As the two examples offered below illustrate, such
Romanian patterns are generally used as translation solutions for source-text
clauses with a normal word order, i.e. clauses in which the starting point is
represented by the Subject noun phrase:
(1) ST: “Consequently, obligatory recognition of those forms should not be
introduced”
TT: “În consecinţă, nu trebuie introdusă recunoaşterea obligatorie a acestor
formulare.”
(32002L0006)
(2) ST: “An increasing number of programmes are being created in a wide range of
fields targeting a variety of categories of beneficiaries …”
TT: “Se creează din ce în ce mai multe programe într-o gamă largă de domenii
destinate unor categorii variate de beneficiari …”
(32003R0058)
It is interesting that, while, in many languages (like English, for
example), such a syntactic structure would represent an extremely marked
thematic choice, this is not the case of the Romanian language, which, as a
general rule, does not impose a very strict order of the Subject and the
Predicate. Moreover, as it can be seen in the examples above, the Predicates
which occupy the theme position are expressed exclusively by impersonal