Translation Strategies Of English Passive Voices

With the deepening of economic globalization,communications between countries are becoming increasingly frequent.And the study of translation,especially the translation history,has also gradually developed.The relations between translators and the transmission of culture,the development of national languages and the dissemination of knowledge are represented in detail in Translators through History.As a result,we can know clearly the role translators play in the development of history.The book is a must for translation majors and lovers,for it has helped us acknowledge the real role of translators and promoted the future translation activities.This translation report is based on the translation of the fourth chapter of Translators through History.Chapter 4 is about the relationship between translators and the dissemination of knowledge.As an expository text,it mainly aims to convey information to readers in simple and understandable words which have a streak of objectivity.And many passive voices can be found in the text to show the objectivity.During the translation process,the author has adopted two strategies to deal with the passive voices.The main strategy is to translate English passive voices into Chinese active ones in view of the syntactic differences between English and Chinese.The concrete methods in the strategy are linear translating,reverse translating,E-C translation of passive voices into non-subject sentences,and adding a subject and conversion.The second strategy is to translate them into Chinese passive ones in consideration of the translation's consistency with the original English version.The concrete method is to add the word “?” or other words with passive meanings to the translation.The whole translating process has been guided by initial norms in Toury's theory of translation norms,which ask the author to make choices between adequacy and acceptability of the translation instead of rigidly adhering to translation equivalence.As for the first strategy,acceptability of the translation is based on and norms of target languages have been adopted.In the second strategy,however,adequacy of translation is followed,for the translation aims at being close to the source language.The report has provided some translation strategies of passive voices during the process of English-Chinese translation.What's more,some experiences and shortcomings from the whole translation process can be drawn so as to further improve the translation ability.