A Study on the Chinese Translations of English Passives: A Super-Sized English-Chinese Parallel Corpus-Based Approach

Passive is a common grammatical category in both English and Chinese languages.However, there are noticeable distinctions in terms of forms, grammatical structures, semantic preferences and pragmatical uses for the representation of passives between English and Chinese.The above distinctions and the absence of equivalent forms give rise to difficulties in the translation of passives between two languages.Based on the Chinese translations of English passives in science-technology texts from a super-sized English-Chinese parallel corpus, this research attempts to reveal the characteristics as well as regularities of the transformation of passive constructions in English-Chinese Translations.