Persian Translated and Nontranslated News: How Translation Changes Thematic Structure

Scrutinizing translated and nontranslated 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 to compare it to the thematic structure in the Persian nontranslated news texts taken from 2: UTPECC and Persica. A total of 2,190 clauses were chosen to examine their thematic structure, employing mainly Halliday and Matthiessen’s (2014) classification of the thematic structure as the functional model. Results of the chi-square test revealed no significant difference between the application of the different thematic elements in both corpora, meaning that the Persian translation of news texts reflects the Persian language thematic structure, rather than the original English texts. Moreover, further analysis showed that the 4 categories of the thematic structure present characteristics of the third code.