Thematic Progression Patterns in the English News and the Persian Translation

Thematic progression pattern as the method of development of the text insures that the reader follows the right path in understanding the text; in this regard, this subject is attracting considerable interest among discourse analysts. This paper calls into question the status of thematic progression in the process of translating English news into Persian. With this in mind, we analyzed the thematic progression patterns of a total of 643 T-units of English news along with their Persian translated version employing Daneš and McCabe progression patterns. The results of the chi-square analysis revealed there was no significant difference between the progression patterns in English and Persian except for the simple linear pattern. Nevertheless, there were some structural changes resulting in alterations in progression patterns: Adding the theme that pushes the theme to rheme, changing the postpositioned declaratives, omitting expletives, the dislocation of the theme in the T-unit and others. In spite of having linguistically motivated and unmotivated alterations, we also found that Persian translation seems to retain the progression pattern of English news.