| With a special reference to the translation of The Supreme Court Case "Skilling V. U.S." (2010), this thesis attempts to analyze the translation of passive voices in legal English.As a litigation judicial document, the source text The Supreme Court Case "Skilling V.U.S." (2010) is fixed in format, is accurate, concise and formal in its language, and widely uses passive voices, which is classified into two categories, the passive sentences with standard passive signs and the passive sentences with passive meanings. The passive voice is used to weaken or hide the law subjects, highlight the agents and present the features of preciseness and objectiveness of law language.Based on the adaptation theory in pragmatics, the passive voices are required in order to follow the rules of adaptation and interaction, and are also used to keep the coherence of discourses, while the politeness theory used in passive sentences can enlarge or decrease subjective feelings from readers to agents by highlighting or hiding the non-agents. According to Liu Chongde’s translation criteria, "faithfulness, expressiveness and closeness" as well as Nida’s functional equivalence theory, the translation of passive voices tends to achieve the equivalence of forms and meanings. If the balance is not achieved, the passive voices will be translated to Chinese state active sentences.Through the analyses of translations in the source text, several methods are adopted in the translation of passive voices of legal English: 1)Passive sentences with standard passive signs are translated into Chinese passive sentences with passive signs such as“被”,“由”,“遭”.2)Passive sentences are translated into Chinese active sentences by changing the meaning of verb of the source text, by switching the subject to the object in target text, and by translating the passive sentence with an active clause.3) Passive sentences are also converted into Chinese judgment constructions. |
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