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영어

Drawing on the notion of theme in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this paper examines the theme systems of Korean statutes and their English translations. In SFL, the theme is an element that serves as the point of departure of a message, and the remainder of the message is the rheme. Because textual meaning is expressed through textual structure, translators need to be aware of thematic mechanisms in both the source and target languages to effectively convey the intended message across different languages. This paper analyzed the themes of clauses in 110 articles of three Korean statutes―the Criminal Act, Civil Act, and Administrative Procedures Act―and their English translations by the Korean National Law Information Center, to examine the extent to which the contents and grammatical functions of the source text clauses agreed with those of the target text clauses. Analysis indicated that the thematic choices of the English translated texts largely reflected those of the Korean source texts. Except in some cases, deviations from the thematic choices of the source text generally seemed to derive from translation strategies that accounted for the grammatical and syntactic differences, thematic structure of the preceding clauses, and the delivery of information. By shedding light on the textual meaning in legal translations, this paper draws attention to the thematic choices in legal translations―from Korean into English―from the theoretical perspectives of SFL. The findings offer some useful insight into translation strategies and have implications for translator training and translation quality assessment.