A Multivariate Analysis On The Chinese Translation Of Get-Passives

The passive construction is a common linguistic phenomenon that can be observed in both Chinese and English languages.Nevertheless,the structures,meanings,and usages of passives in two languages have fundamentally differed,which frequently gives rise to the difficulty in the translation of passives.Therefore,the passive construction of Chinese and English has always been discussed in English-Chinese contrastive language studies and translation studiesIn general,"be+past participle"(hereafter "be-passive")and "get+past participle"(hereafter "get-passives")are the two major forms of passive constructions in English.The former is considered as the norm structure of English passives,which is widely used in languages with formal context.On the contrary,the get-passive is much preferred and can be observed only in informal contexts.Hence,in compared with "be-passive",the translation of "get-passives" to Chinese is much overlooked due to the lack of data in a parallel corpus.Owing to the development of the corpus,especially a super-sized English-Chinese parallel corpus,it lays a solid foundation for the current research and paves the way for studying the Chinese translation of get passivesBased on BFSU Chinese-English Parallel Corpus,this survey firstly comes to the conclusion of the linguistic features of get-passives.In forms,more short passives without agents can be observed;syntactically,it serves as predicate and is used in present tense without showing aspect feature;semantically,it carries neutral semantic prosody.Pragmatically,words with explicit meaning and living features serve as the patient.Secondly,the forms of Chinese translations of get passives are identified,and it is noted that there are roughly ten Chinese translation forms,namely active construction,patient subject,passive construction,omission,delexical,nominalization,attributives,verbal object,and causative construction.Thirdly,this thesis mainly reveals the linguistic features of get passives from perspectives of forms,syntax,semantics,pragmatics,and genres and how the types of get passives have different impacts on the translation forms.To be specific,central passives tend to be translated into passives in Chinese,which is consistent with the explicitation in corpus-based translation studies.However,patient subjective frequently occurs in semi passives,and active construction occurs frequently in pseudo passives,which is in line with the Chinese using habit and translation universal.Fourthly,there are similarities and differences between the forms of Chinese translations and the linguistic features of get passives in genre variations.Apart from patient subjective,more passives are observed in the translation of science and technology.In forms,it is more agentless;in syntax,more present tense without aspect feature can be observed;semantically,there are more neutral semantic words with more dynamic punctual words;pragmatically,it is the words with explicit meaning and living feature that serve as the patient.It is noted that more passives in negative semantics agree with previous findings.There are more active sentences in social science,news and literature,although they share forms in common with science and technology.However,syntactically,more past tense is observed in literature,and semantically,the neutral passive also occurs more frequently.This thesis studies the translation forms of get passives between English and Chinese,which not only further reveals the nature of English and Chinese language,but also provides a theoretical and practical basis for translation studies and their universal studies by comparing the similarities and differences between English-Chinese translation models,aiming to promote significantly the translation studies like machine translation and translation teaching.