A Corpus-Based Study Of Bei Construction In The Chinese Versions Of Shakespeare's Plays

The BEI construction is one of the typical syntactic structures of modern Chinese passive forms, which constitutes a significant Chinese grammatical phenomenon. Since the term"passive forms"was publically put forward in Modern Chinese Grammar (《中国现代语法》, 1985), the study on the BEI construction maintains to be a heated spot of debate and discussion. The body of literature dedicated to the study of this linguistic phenomenon falls into four categories, studies on the construction in the classical Chinese, in the modern vernacular Chinese, in the modern Chinese dialects, and in the comparison between Chinese and English.However, previous studies on BEI construction concerning modern vernacular Chinese, though covering a wide range of topics and aspects, are characteristic of a lack of a concern for studies based on translated texts. The present paper shifts the focus to a new perspective, the BEI construction in the translated texts. It attempts to explore the similarities and the dissimilarities in the use of BEI construction from different Chinese translations to the same English source text and at once to account for the results of the exploration.The paper carries out a corpus-based study on the subject, the two Chinese translations of Shakespeare's plays by Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao respectively, assisted by the tool of the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Shakespeare's Plays (to be referred to as the Corpus in the following) which is coupled up with the corpus searching and processing tool, ParaConc, for the actual situation in terms of the application of the BEI construction. First, the Chinese translation texts are compared, in general, with the original Chinese texts in terms of the frequency of character BEI realizing passive form. The comparison shows that the BEI construction in Liang's translation has a significantly higher frequency than the entire sample original Chinese texts while Zhu's reveal no prominent difference from the sample original Chinese texts. The second and central comparison the paper conducts is that between the two Chinese translations of the English texts by the two different translators. The comparison, carried out in the dimension of the original English sentences that are translated into Chinese BEI construction, generates at once significant similarities and difference between the two translations. In specific, the two translations reveal similarities in the following aspects,1) the BEI constructions in their translations are both overwhelmingly from four types of English structures, the active voice, the passives, the passive participles and the nouns and gerunds;2) in both translations, BEI construction translated from the English passives take up the largest percentage while those from nouns and gerunds form the smallest;3) BEI construction from English passive participles in both translations enjoys similar percentage.And the three critical differences revealed from the comparison are,1) there are much more BEI construction in Liang's translation than in Zhu's, an almost 2 to 1 ratio;2) BEI construction from English passives are far more in Liang's translation than in Zhu's and their percentage is larger in the former's than in the latter's;3) Zhu's translation is about twice that of Liang's in terms of BEI construction from English active voice.The paper probes into the underlying motivation for the application of the subject construction, which is found, within and between the two translations and between translations and original works, to show resemblance and contrast from the perspectives of cognition, or rather, schemata and translational aims of the translators. One the one hand, the paper found that the agreement of BEI construction with the English source structures in terms of the dominant event schema hidden behind underlines the translation of the English structures into Chinese BEI construction in both Chinese translations. There are the cognitive and syntactic factors that determine the translation of English passive structures, passive participles and nouns and gerunds into Chinese BEI construction while the pragmatic and discourse consideration makes the translators translate English active structures into Chinese passive structures, specifically, BEI construction. One the other hand, it is the sharp contrast between Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao in terms of their translational purpose and target reader that elaborates the discrepancy between the translations with regard to the application of BEI construction. The former related himself and his activity to the then unsatisfactory situation of Chinese literary community and the over-liberated intellectuals within this community with a view to changing the situation for the better and purify the atmosphere via the humanity-lauding and rationality-exalting Western classic work, and consequently, his task is to express in Chinese as close both the form and content of the original as possible. The latter, on the contrary, was dedicatedly concerned with preserving national reputation and entertaining the mass public. In this connection, his goal is to render the target text close to Chinese ways of expression at the expense of the original so that there could be a multitude of Chinese people acquainted with the world-class literary classics. The difference in their translational aims is also the factor that underlies the difference between the two translations and the sample Chinese original texts.