Persian translated and non-translated news: How translation changes thematic structure

Abstract

Scrutinizing translated and non-translated texts in a language reveals the characteristics of translationese. Additionally, thematic structure is among the most widely used tools for doing so; therefore, the research aim was to examine how thematic structure was presented in the Persian translated news, translated from English into Persian, and comparing it to the thematic structure in the Persian non-translated news texts taken from two corpora, UTPECC and Persica. A total of 2190 clauses were chosen to examine their thematic structure, employing mainly Halliday and Matthiessen's classification of the thematic structure as the functional model. The results of the Chi-Square test revealed no significant difference between the application of different thematic elements in both corpora. This means Persian translation of news texts reflects the Persian language thematic structure rather than the original English texts'. Moreover, further analysis showed that four categories of the thematic structure present characteristics of the <em>third code</em>.