A Principle For Reproducing Passive Meanings From English To Chinese:a Perspective Of Discourse Topic

Among numerous studies on E-C translation, reproducing passive meanings has always been a heated topic. In fact, scholars have realized that there is much difficulty for novice translators to reproduce passive meanings from English to Chinese, for translationese, unacceptable Chinese expressions, occurs often in their translations.This thesis follows both qualitative methods and quantitative methods. The theory of discourse topic chains is applied for a better understanding and explanation of what a fluent Chinese text may be.Thus based on researches on the data collected from three groups of people:established authors, established translators and undergraduates of English major, principles of reproducing passives from English into Chinese have been brought out.Furthermore, this research relates E-C translation of passive meanings to the study of translation universals firstly proposed by Mona Baker in1993. Simplification and normalization have been proved existing in this thesis. What’s new is that we find out that genres and translators’competence will influence the representation of Translation Universals, which provides new ways and directions for further research on Translation Universals.