THEMATIZATION AND TRANSLATION IN ACADEMIC TEXTS: A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY

Thematic structures play essential roles in organizing the message and enabling it to be communicated and understood clearly. Worth-questioning issues are how translator deals with these structures as textual features and what may happen to these features when a text goes through a translation process. Unfortunately, few studies have addressed these issues. Following Halliday’s (1994) thematic organization and McCabe’s (1999) thematic progression, this study tried to investigate and compare the different types of thematic organization and thematic progression patterns used in English and Persian academic texts To do this, the first four pages of the first chapter of six English applied linguistics books and their translation versions were selected. These books are representatives of applied linguistics books taught in the Iranian universities at both undergraduate and graduate levels. Analyses of both text types revealed that there were significant differences between the source texts and the translated texts regarding thematic organization and progression. The study concluded that to use these cohesive devices effectively and to create more cohesive texts, both authors and translators must be aware of them.