Analyzing Vietnamese Sentences from a Theme – Rheme Perspective: Implication for Translation into Korean

Abstract

Unlike the traditional subject - predicate approach, which focuses on identifying the boundaries and relations among syntactic constituents within a sentence, the Theme - Rheme approach emphasizes the analysis of sentences at the level of information structure. From the perspective of Vietnamese - Korean translation, this study shows that sentence analysis based solely on the subject - predicate structure may, in some cases, result in Korean translations that are unnatural or semantically inaccurate. By contrast, the Theme - Rheme approach proves particularly useful for identifying focal information and the speaker’s communicative intent, thereby providing appropriate guidance for organizing translated sentences.

Based on a corpus of Vietnamese simple sentences extracted from translation teaching materials and authentic translation data, the study employs descriptive and analytical methods, contrastive analysis, and translation analysis to clarify the characteristics of information organization in Vietnamese simple sentences from a Theme - Rheme perspective. On this basis, it proposes translation strategies for rendering the Theme - Rheme structure of Vietnamese simple sentences into Korean. The findings contribute to improving the accuracy and naturalness of Vietnamese - Korean translations and provide both theoretical and practical foundations for translation teaching and research