ABSTRACT

The present study, part of the DIRECT Project (LAEL/PUC-SP), aimed at analysing
cultural issues involved in the translation into English of Annual Reports produced
by Brazilian companies. Therefore, it is inserted in the recent cultural translation
theories (Snell-Hornby, 1988/1995), which postulate that translating a text cannot be
reduced to a mere transcoding of lexis and grammar, but that it involves translating
its culture. The study was based on the following hypothesis: if the original and
translated Reports have different Contexts of Situation and Contexts of Culture, this
should reflect on the texts in many ways. Among the various elements that could
reveal the presence or absence of target-culture concerns, this study focussed on the
Theme, or point-of-departure of the message, according to the systemic-functional
proposal (Halliday (1994), Thompson (1996) and Fries (1983, 1994, 1995 a and b)).
Fundamental to the internal organisation of the text, the Theme was selected due to
the fact that each language/culture has its own preferred ways of organising and
structuring discourse. The corpus of the study is composed of 05 Annual Reports
produced in Portuguese by Brazilian companies, their corresponding translations
into English, and 04 Annual Reports produced in English by North-American
companies. The corpus was analysed with two main objectives: 1) to investigate
whether the thematic structures of the translations are similar to the thematic
structures of the Brazilian Annual Reports or to the thematic structures of the North-
American Annual Reports; 2) to test the validity of the hypothesis proposed by Fries
(1995 a e b), according to which the experiential content of the Themes correlate
with different genres. Results showed that the majority of the Themes of the
Brazilian and North-American Annual Reports expresses the same types of
experiential meanings; however, each culture allows the use of some kinds of Theme
that are not used in the other culture. Besides, the Themes of the Brazilian and
North-American Annual Reports differ mainly in relation to their extension: the
majority of the Portuguese Themes are extremely long, whereas the English Themes
are short. The majority of the translations presented Themes similar to the original
Portuguese Themes; even so, they could be sub-divided in three groups: Group 1 is
characterised by the absence of thematic changes when compared to the original
texts; Group 2 presents thematic changes, but it was not possible to perceive which
criteria the translators used to make these changes; Group 3 was the only one to
present changes motivated by target-culture concerns. The comparison between
Themes from genres found in the literature and the Themes found in this piece of
research seems to validate Fries’ hypothesis, for it suggested that the experiential
content of the Themes is genre-specific. However, the present piece of research
demonstrated that different cultures, in the case of the Brazilian and North-American
Annual Reports, influence on the contents expressed by these documents. Therefore,
Fries hypothesis should read, the experiential contents of the Themes correlate with
different genres but, inside one genre, these contents change according to the culture
in which the genre is functioning.