On Translation Of The Passive Voice

This is a report on translating three chapters of The News Sorority,a biography relating the life of three anchorwomen in the TV news.The translation is intended to help Chinese readers better understand the life of anchorwomen in the TV news.Through the translation task,the author expands her vocabularies concerning TV news and enhances her translation competence.The passive voice is not only one of the most striking linguistic features of this book,but also one of the major difficulties encountered in translating.Considering this,the author decides to discuss the translation of the passive voice in the report.There are more than 70 sentences with the passive voice in the source text,some of which even contain two passive voices.Thus the translating gets more difficult.Many papers and books have been published to discuss how to translate the passive voice,yet they do not point out whether there are some laws in the translation.To explore this issue,the translator compares different translation methods in the report.The discussion includes two parts:(1)translation of the passive voice with the agent;(2)translation of the passive voice without the agent.The former is characterized by the structure of “the passive voice+ by+ the agent”.It is further divided into two parts:(1)the receiver of the action is an animate being;(2)the receiver is an inanimate thing.The latter is also divided in this way.The translator finds there is no law but some tendencies in the translation of the passive voice from English to Chinese:(1)when the agent is mentioned and the receiver is an animate being,the passive voice can be either translated into the marked passive voice or the active voice with the agent as the subject.(2)when the agent is mentioned and the receiver is an inanimate thing,the passive voice can be rendered into the marked passive voice,the active voice with the agent as the subject or the active voice with “?...?”——the most popular version in the case that the passive voice is in the main clause.(3)when the agent is not mentioned and the receiver is an animate being,the passive voice is usually translated into the marked passive voice,the unmarked passive voice and the active voice with the added agent as the subject.The marked passive voice is best received.The less received one is the unmarked passive voice.(4)when the agent is not mentioned and the receiver is an inanimate thing,the passive voice is usually translated into the marked passive voice,the unmarked passive voice and the active voice with the added agent as the subject.In some cases,the passive voice can be rendered into the active voice with no subject,the active voice with the preposition phrase after the passive voice in the source text as the subject or into an adjective.Among these versions,the unmarked passive voice is best received.What's more,we seldom translate the passive voice without the agent into the active voice with the added agent as the subject unless the agent is known or the agent can be replaced by the generic pronoun.