The Essence of Thematic Structures in the Academic Translated Texts

Abstract

Thematic structure and progression play a major role in organizing the message and in enabling it to be communicated and understood clearly. One issue in translation is how translators tackle these cohesive devices when a text is translated into another language. This paper was centered on reviewing the status of thematic development and progression cross-linguistically taking translation into account. Reviewing previously conducted studies attest to the fact that thematic structures are greatly effective and valuable tools in translation process. They let translators to be conscious where they are losing their effectiveness in their arguments in terms of theme/rheme organization. Both writers and translators should have enough knowledge about thematic structures in creation and interpretation of texts. Translators should get mastery over the grammar and structure of both source and target languages at least in terms of thematic structure. Since, as stated by Ventola (1995), in academic texts the theme/rheme patterns are important in guiding the reader through the logical paths constructed by the writer. If little attention is paid in translation to these rhetorical effects, the writer's attempts to help the reader are destroyed (p. 102).

Keywords: Theme, Rheme, Thematic organization, Thematic progression, Translation.