TRANSLATION AND MEANING: A CULTURAL- COGNITIVE ...

the legislative act, to the exact realities targeted by the legal provisions, and
to the instruments used in order to achieve the actual functioning of the law.
The thematization of all these central concepts, which are constantly given
as reference points for the addressee, plays a major part in ensuring the
clarity of this type of discourse. If, however, some other element of the
clause structure is placed in theme position (i.e. especially the Adverbial
Phrase), it is meant to provide either a point of orientation or some contrast.
At the same time, my analysis indicates that the thematic features
revealed by the Romanian translations of the EU documents are closely
influenced by those of their English sources. There are also situations when
the Romanian translator changes the thematic make-up of the original text,
but, in most of the cases, such shifts are motivated by the translator’s desire
to conform to the norms of the target-language usage and are meant to
promote naturalness in the translated document. However, as illustrated
earlier, my corpus also reveals instances when the translator’s change of the
thematic structure does not seem to have any clear or objective motivation,
and, moreover, it presents the risk of leading to difficulties of
comprehension, or even of affecting the intended meaning of the original
utterance.
It can be concluded that, as long as the translator does not perform
major changes in the thematic structure of the original text, both the English
and the Romanian variants of the EU documents present the addressee with
a flow of information which is quite smooth and, consequently, not very
difficult to process. In other words, whether the new themes are connected
to a constituent of the previous rheme or to some of the themes introduced
that far, whether they refer to the topic entity or offer some perspective on it,
the thematic organization characterizing the texts of the EU legislation is of
great help in the identification of the topic entity and in the correct
understanding of the content.
References
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Bhatia, V. K. 1993. Analyzing Genre: Language Use in Professional Settings. London:
Longman.
Brown, G. and G. Yule. 1993 (1983). Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1967. ‘Notes on transitivity and theme in English: Part 2’. In Journal of
Linguistics, 3, pp. 199-244.
Mathesius, V. 1942. ‘From Comparative Word Order Studies’. In Časopis pro Moderni
Filoligii 28.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and J. Svartvick. 1991 (1985). A Comprehensive
Grammar of the English Language. London and New York: Longman.