A Comparative Study Of English And French Translations Of Chinese Unmarked Patient-Subject Sentences

President Xi Jinping's report at the 19~thh CPC National Congress is a typical political text.Political texts are characterized by peculiar vocabulary,structure and discourse features,with their language expressions being more objective and rigorous.It can be noticed that Xi's report has used a lot of unmarked patient-subject constructions.Unmarked patient-subject constructions are a special structure in Chinese,especially in Chinese political texts.In general,such constructions are known as unmarked passive sentences or semantic passive sentences.At the current stage,relevant research has mainly focused on the types,compositional features,semantic features of such constructions and their generating mechanism.Few research has been done on the translation of this kind of structure.This paper finds that unmarked patient-subject constructions in the report are structurally similar in that all of them have a result patient,which is one of proto-patients.It means that the patient-subject is directly affected by the action.This type of sentence emphasizes the incident itself and highlights the passive meaning.In addition,the unmarked patient-subject constructions in this report demonstrates high consistence,most of which are the S+adv.+V structure and some of which are the S+V structure.Given the structural differences between Chinese and English/French,it can be predicted that such unmarked patient-subject constructions in the said report should be translated into sentences of passive meaning in both English and French versions.The paper first summarizes and compares the ways of passive expression in English and French and then closely examines the translation of unmarked patient-subject constructions in the English and French versions.Besides,the paper also analyzes the methods used in the translation of unmarked patient-subject constructions from the perspectives of sentence meaning and sentence structure,and discusses the different translation skills that can be found in English and French to deal with unmarked patient-subject constructions.It is found that most unmarked patient-subject constructions in the source text are rendered into passive structures in the English version,and most of such constructions are translated into active voice in the French version.To sum up,this paper tries to study the unmarked patient-subject constructions in the Xi's report at the 19~thh CPC National Congress and explore the translation methods in English and French to handle this sentence structure.It is hoped that the present research may have significant implications for future translation of political texts.