Translation Of English Passive Sentences In Popular Science Texts

The text of this study report is Chapter 17 Air Pollution from the book Natural Resources Conservation.The original text involves many different fields such as physics,geography and chemistry,which requires the translator pay attention to related background material.The original text is categorized into the popular science text which is one type of technology writing.Popular science texts are scientific,objective and accurate;accordingly,they have a number of passive sentences to describe objective phenomenon and truth.But at the same time,popular science texts are also popular and interesting to some degree because their target readers are nonprofessional people.As a result,the translator should not only deal with the passive sentences,but also try various devices to take its distinctive characteristics into consideration which are very distinct from scientific paper and technical document.While currently,most studies focuses on these two those types of text,a few focuses on the passive sentences in popular science texts.Consequently,the study of passive sentences in this paper helps to provide proper translation methods for translators,promotes the technology communication home and abroad.This paper discusses the translation methods in passive sentences drawing on Nida's functional equivalence,especially his “the four basic requirements” summarized by him — making sense,conveying the spirit and manner of the original,having a natural and easy form of expression,and producing a similar response.This report introduces the characteristics of popular science texts which are different from other texts,and it also makes a comparison between Chinese and English passive sentences,including the basic structure and meaning.Case analysis method is used to discuss the translation strategies for passive sentences in the translation project.During the translation process,the translator tried various devices to make the translated text expressive,and comply with Chinese language habits,avoid translationese.Five translation methods are in this report used to translate the passive sentences;passive sentences can be translated into active sentences,no subject sentences,passive sentences,and the methods of sentence element conversion and additional translation of a subject are also used.While the methods discussed in this paper do not cover all of the translation methods,and at the same time,the translated texts in the case analysis may be not the best,and there would be better versions.