Blurred borderlines between theme and rheme in translated Hungarian Eurotexts

The paper deals with the consequences of regressive focussing in Eurotexts translated from English into Hungarian. Regressive focussing means that the verb of the Hungarian sentence fulfils the task of focus selection a posteriori. This may lead to undesirable consequences in translated Hungarian texts, managed by translators and editors with the help of special strategies discussed in the paper. The first consequence of regressive focussing is the blurred borderline between the thematic and rhematic parts of the sentence. In English, in accordance with the SVO word order, the first element of the rheme is always the verbal predicate which serves as a borderline marker between the theme and the rheme. In Hungarian, the first element of the rheme, in accordance with the dominant SOV word order, is often a noun phrase, which does not show formal differences to the thematic noun phrase or phrases, and the borderline between them is indicated only regressively by the verb, which may be the last element in the sentence. Another phenomenon of translated Hungarian texts may be called overburdening of the focus slot, when there is more than one element in focus position. As inverted verbs or semantically weak Hungarian verbs are open to the left, the focus slot can be occupied not only by the stressed postverbal component of the IE clause, but by all the postverbal components. In this case, the Hungarian verb will be pushed towards the end of the clause/sentence. Because of what is often called free word order in Hungarian, the occurrence of the verb in final position will not make the sentence grammatically incorrect, but leads to belated identification of the communicative structure of the sentence. The consequences of this belated identification will be realised by readers only on the level of the whole text, and is a clear sign of translationese.