A Contrastive Analysis of Ideational, Interpersonal and Textual Themes in English and Urdu

Abstract

The present study deals with metafunctional diversity of thematic relations i.e. ideational, interpersonal and textual in English and Urdu. The objectives are: (1) to describe the functional significance particular to thematic progression (McCabe, 1999) of thematic structures in the English and the Urdu texts, and (2) to discuss how effectively the English thematic structures have been translated into Urdu. The English text Things Fall Apart by Achebe(1994) and its Urdu translation, Bikharti Duniya byUllah (1991) have been annotated through the annotation scheme of the UAM Corpus Tool(O`Donnell, 2008). The annotated English and Urdu clauses are analyzed to discuss their the maticstructures. The results show that the functional significance and thematic progression patterns are identical, but because of the unmotivated displacement of themes, the translation choices become ambiguous.To resolve ambiguities, possible translation choices have been suggested.