A Corpus-based Study On The English Translation Of Chinese Retained-object Passives In The Four Chinese Classical Novels

Chinese retained-object passive is a special passive construction in which an object can remain behind a passivized verb.The grammatical peculiarity of such kind of passives is that the retained object at the end of a passive is the real patient instead of the subject.Therefore,how to tackle the retained object is the key point in translation.This thesis takes the four Chinese classical novels as the source of corpora,using three sub-corpora from the Pool of Bilingual Parallel Corpora of Chinese Classics and a self-built parallel corpus of Outlaws of the Marsh,and explores the syntactic structure and semantic features of Chinese retained-object passives and their corresponding English expressions with the combination of quantitative and qualitative methods,and then summarizes the equivalent English forms and translation techniques.It offers a reference in the learning and teaching of translation.According to the research results,some findings are concluded as follows:In terms of Chinese retained-object passives collected in the corpora,there are two main types:the idiomatic and the canonical one.In the idiomatic one,the verb-object pattern is usually with strong idiomaticity,so it must be stored and possessed as a formulaic sequence in the whole.Canonical passive is generated by procedure-based derivation.Four sub-types can be classified according to the semantic relationship between the subject and the retained object in such kind of passives,including the "possessor-possessee" relationship,the"whole-part" relationship,the resultant meaning and the combination of the meaning of first two.In the four Chinese classical novels,the passive marker with the highest frequency is ?("bei").Through the investigation,it verifies that the semantic prosody of retained object passives is also prone to be negative.Besides,the main semantic preference is affected meaning due to plentiful affected verbs there.There are three main types of the English translation in the corpora such as English passive structures,non-passive structures and omission.Most of the Chinese passives with retained objects are translated into English non-passive structures,namely active sentences,prepositional phrases,phrasal verbs,infinitives,gerunds,attributive clauses and adverbials.As for different types of Chinese passives,their corresponding translation is also different.Most idiomatic passives are translated to English active sentences and Be-passives.The translation of canonical ones is sort of complex in types,common in English passives with prepositional phrases,Have-passives and Get-passives,phrasal verbs and adverbials.In detail,resultant canonical passives are usually translated to adverbials and the third type of canonical passives is always in the form of English passives with prepositional phrases.It also finds that the part of reasons for different translations lie in the different methods for handling the syntactic structure and semantic prosody of original language.For instance,in order to stand out the syntactic position and semantic color of retained-object,English passives with prepositional phrases or Have-passives are always used in the translation.Therefore,in the translation of such special Chinese retained-object passives,it should not be restricted in only one fixed sentence pattern.Instead it should be handled flexibly with the combination of syntactic structure and semantic features.