A Study On The Translation Of English Passive Sentences Based On Agricultural Bilingual Parallel Corpus

It can be said that the passive sentence is a very common linguistic phenomenon in EST(English for science and technology).When the agent is unknown and difficult to explain,or when the agent is self-evident from the context,or when the agent is less important than the patient,the passive sentence is used here to emphasize the patient.In Chinese,Ba-sentence and Bei-sentence are two prominent forms of passive sentences.In this paper,The State of Food and Agriculture from 2006 to 2015 were selected as the research data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO),and several softwares were used to turn the bilingual reports of ten years into a small corpus.After using the quantitative analysis method,101 Ba-sentences and 399 Bei-sentences were extracted from the self-built corpus with million words.And the quantitative analysis show that English passive sentences with active form and passive meaning are always translated into Ba-sentence,while English passive sentences with passive form and passive meaning are translated into Bei-sentence.In the process of English-Chinese translation of the passive sentences in EST,the use of Bei-sentence more than the use of Ba-sentence.According to the study of semantic features of English passive sentences,there are the following summaries:In the process of translating English passive sentences,we must grasp the semantic features of predicate verbs in these passive sentences.It can be said that the semantics of the predicate verb in the English passive sentence is the translation mechanism of choosing Ba-sentence or Bei-sentence.There are two specific circumstances:First,if the semantics of the predicate verb in the English passive sentence is"disposition",it can be translated into Ba-sentence.According to the semantic elements of Ba-sentence,including the agent,action,patient,the action object and the result of the action,we can use the translation techniques named as "division first synthesization second"in the order of "disposition-treatment-cause".In addition,conversion method is used to highlight the object of Ba-sentence.Here,the object is the patient.Second,if the semantics of predicate verbs in English passive sentences is "adversity implicature",it can be translated into Bei-sentence.In the Bei-sentence,the polyvalency of the predicate verb is the sufficient condition for the transitivity of the predicate verb,and the monovalence of the predicate verb is the essential condition for the intransitivity of the predicate verb.Therefore,translation techniques of amplification and omission should be used appropriately to determine the existence of the patient,agent and participant in Bei-sentence according to the transitivity or intransitivity of the predicate verb in English passive sentence.No matter the choices of Ba-sentence or Bei-sentence and the uses of translation techniques,a variety of translation techniques should be used flexibly on the basis of the actual context to make the translation nature in the language nature,accurate in the content and objective in the emotion.