Towards a target-oriented model for quantitative contrastive analysis in translation studies An exploratory study of theme-rheme structure in Spanish-English biomedical research articles

This paper describes the design of a 192-text Spanish-English specialized corpus of biomedical research articles (RAs) divided into three 64-text subcorpora (English texts, their corresponding Spanish translations, and Spanish comparable texts) for use in quantitative contrastive analysis. The paper also presents an exploratory study analysing theme-rheme structure in these subcorpora. Two definitions of theme were used: Halliday's ideational theme and preverbal theme (i.e., all clause constituents before the finite verb of the main clause). The study adopted a target-oriented approach and assessed the acceptability of the translated texts with regard to the statistical norm of the comparable native-speaker Spanish subcorpus. Statistically significant differences were found for marked theme and its different syntactic manifestations (prepositional phrase adjunct and subordinate clauses) and there was evidence of a different thematic distribution within the semantic category person (researcher, patient, first person). The most striking results were found for different measures of theme length, suggesting a consistent information overload in the thematic zone in the whole RA and in the individual rhetorical sections except for the Introduction. The translated texts occupy a kind of no-man's land half-way between the source articles and the independently created Spanish RAs. A refined three-stage model of the study design is proposed for future target-oriented quantitative and qualitative research into translation.