Probing Into The Passive Voice As Well As Its Translation In Legal English

Accompany with the study of contrastive linguistics, many linguists make a deepcomparison about the passive voice both in English and Chinese. Compared withChinese, there are more passive voices in English; especially in News English,Scientific English and Legal English which have high requirement for objectivity andformality. As a stylistic mark, the passive voice has become a hot topic for linguists,but most of the studies base only on syntactic level; and there are not many deepstudies on passive voice in legal English.Passive voice as well as its translation in legal English is an academic issueworthy of deep study, and functional equivalence theory provides a theoreticalsupport for the passive voice translation. First of all, as one of the most importantsyntactic features, passive voice is widely used in legislative texts, court language andother different legal texts. There are following three reasons, the first reason is thatpassive voice is a grammatical label for English language; the second reason is thatpassive voice can make the legal English more objective and accurate; the thirdreason is that it can hide and weaken the performer of the action and stress the theme.Secondly, it is difficult for Chinese to understand the passive voice in English, themain reason is that English is hypotaxis-oriented, and the objective notion isfrequently emphasized in its sentences; Chinese is parataxis-oriented, the subjectiveconsciousness is usually stressed; moreover, the different language structures betweenChinese and English usually cause gaps for Chinese people to comprehend the passivevoice in legal English. Thirdly, the translation of passive voice can help Chinesepeople to comprehend foreign legal texts and overcome the difficulties incomprehension. Nida’s functional equivalence theory can be the basic theory for us toprobe into the passive voice translation in legal English because it holds that thetranslation should not be limited by the form; and the translators should convey theideas, intent and emotion of the original text well in order to make the readers havethe similar response with the original readers, which can also provide theoreticreference for the future deep studies of passive voice.