| The present study is a corpus-based comparative investigation of Theme and thematic progression in English and Russian. While monolingual thematic studies have a long history in Linguistics, comparative studies are relatively few, in particular for the given language pair. In addition to filling the existing gap in the field of Translation Studies, this study tests Toury's law of interference (1995:275). Three corpora are used in the dissertation: the English source text corpus that includes ten articles from the online version of the magazine national geographic, the Russian target text corpus of translations of those ten articles published on the Russian version of the website, and a comparable corpus of non-translated Russian texts of the same genre taken from the online magazine V Mire ZHivotnykh (In the World of Animals). The definitions of Theme and Rheme are based on the theory of functional sentence perspective developed by the Prague school linguists. Furthermore, the study uses question test (Ann Hatcher 1956, Danes 1970, Sgall 1974, Hajicova 1984, etc.) to draw the boundary between the Theme and the Rheme in the clause. Additionally, a modified version of Danes' (1974) model of thematic progression was applied. As expected, no significant differences were found in the thematic progression types used in the three corpora due to the fact that they belong to the same genre. The comparison of the means by which Themes connect to the previous Theme or Rheme showed that most of the time translators tend to conform to the norms of the target system rather than be influenced by the make-up of the source text as it was expected. Toury's law of interference, however, is supported by the statistical results of the analysis of textual connectivity---the number of clauses between the given Theme and the nearest Theme or Rheme in the previous context that it relates to. Based on the results, the study provides recommendations for translators, editors, trainers, and others involved in the language industry. Moreover, specific pedagogical suggestions are made and future directions are outlined. |
