A Study On The Translation Of Marked Passive Sentences In The Scholars

Based on The scholars translated by Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang, this paper aims to study marked passive structures.Most of the research on translation of the passive sentences from Chinese into English has been conducted in a qualitative manner, which is comparatively subjective. To avoid the limitation and unilateralism of the qualitative approach, this research aims to study the translation of marked Chinese passive sentences into English by combining the qualitative and quantitative approaches with the aid of corpus, and tries to make an analysis of the translation methods and strategies. In order to achieve this aim, a self-built parallel corpus is used.This thesis explores Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's translation of The Scholars on different linguistic levels, including words, phrases, sentences, and reader's response.Major findings obtained from this study are as follows:First, the most frequently used passive makers in The Scholars are bei and shou, and then meng. Nearly 51.4% sentences with bei and 29.5% sentences with shou express dissatisfaction and discontent, which are usually used to express something pleasant and beneficial to the agent. They are called negative passives. However, the sentences with meng have the honorific and fortunate semantic color, which are called positive passives.Second, "Be-Ven" is the typical structure for the passive in English. However, not all marked Chinese passives are translated into the passive syntactic structure. When translating, the translators were not restricted into a simple and fixed passive structure. Instead, they handled the translation flexibly, and in this way, their translation is faithful to the original, both in style and content.Third, from this study, we can see that Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang's translation has achieved Functional Equivalence to the maximum and meanwhile their translation has also achieved formal correspondence to some extent which makes up for the disadvantages of Functional Equivalence. Their translation testifies the guiding role of Functional Equivalence in practice and also has improved the achievement of Functional Equivalence in practice.