A Study On The Translation Of Markered Passive Sentences In Shui Hu Zhuan

Most of the research on translation of the passive constructions of Chinese and English has been conducted in a qualitative manner which is comparatively subjective. This research aims to study the translation of markered 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 corpus consists of two texts, one of which is the original text of Shui Hu Zhuan, and the other is the translated version by J.H.Jackson. Through analysis of the two texts with the help of data obtained, comparison of the two texts is made. Major findings obtained from this study are as follows.Firstly, the most frequently used passive markers in Shui Hu Zhuan are bei and chi. Bei sentence mainly appear in the narration, while the marker chi followed by meng has strong dominance in spoken language, and it often appears in the dialogues. Nearly 47% of the meng sentences have the same function as bei and chi sentences, which express passive meaning. However, the verbs in the meng sentence are usually pleasant and beneficial to the subject. They are called positive passives, while 51.5% of the bei sentences and 61% of the chi sentences express dissatisfaction and discontent. They are called negative passives.Secondly, "Be-Ven " is the typical structure of the passive in English, However, not all markered Chinese passives are translated into the syntactic passive structure. As a synthetic analytic language, English has various other forms available to denote passive, and some can be turned into non-passive structures, such as active sentences, phrasal verbs, noun phrase, preposition phrase, attributive clauses, adjectives, infinitives, gerunds, etc.When we are translating Chinese passive sentences into English, we should not be restricted into a simple and fixed passive structure. Instead, we should consider and analyze the structural components, syntactic characteristics, and functions of both Chinese and English passive construction, and handle the translation flexibly, and only in the manner can the translation be faithful to the original, both in style and content.