On Translation Of Passive Sentences In Narrative Nonfiction From The Perspective Of English-chinese Contrastive Studies

This report is based on the translation of a narrative nonfiction book named Wine and War—The French,the Nazis,and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure.Wine and War is written by the American authors Donald Kladstrup and Petie Kladstrup.It is about the history during World War II when the Nazis looted millions of bottles of wine from the French.After reading,translating and analyzing the material,the translator found that passive sentences frequently appeared in the book(134 times in Introduction and the first two chapters of the book).Among the 134 sentences,16 of them are passive sentences with the agent;118 of them are the ones without the agent.The frequent use of passives brought some difficulties to the translation process.In order to explore the reasons for this phenomenon and the translation strategies of the passive sentences in narrative nonfiction,the translator conducted an analysis from the perspective of English-Chinese contrastive studies.By analyzing the 134 examples,the translator found that passives were frequently used in the source text for some reasons.Firstly,the passive voice is used in many sentences since the agents are inferable,unknown or less important than the receptor.Secondly,the passive is also used in order to make a sentence grammatically correct and right-branching.Moreover,Wine and War,as a narrative nonfiction book,has a high demand for information objectivity.Therefore,the authors use passive sentences to assure authenticity of the information.To translate the passive sentences,the translator should firstly be familiar with the sentence structures used to express passive meaning in Chinese.Then,the translator should adopt the most suitable strategy to polish the translation from the perspective of English-Chinese contrastive studies.In this report,six translation strategies are concluded:(1)using passive sentences;(2)using active sentences;(3)using non-subject sentences;(4)using judgment-expressing sentences;(5)using disposal constructions;(6)using fixed expressions.Among them,strategy(2)is used for 68 times,being the most frequently used one.This shows that active sentences are usually used to express passive relations in Chinese due to the Chinese way of expressing and thinking.