A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English Passive Voice In Legal Language

Massive employment of passive voice has been identified as a striking feature oflegal English. In contrastive linguistics, the frequency of English passive voice ismuch higher than that in Chinese. Therefore, When passive voice in legal English istranslated into Chinese, two questions must be considered: Should passive voice beretained or not. If retained, what form is appropriate for us to adopt in suchreservation. If not, which form should it be converted to. The aim of this thesis here isto give a discussion to such issue, hoping to serve as a reference to legal Englishlearners and translators.The thesis attempts to study from the perspective of contrastive linguistics with thedata of GATT in both English and Chinese version to analyze the conversion betweenEnglish and Chinese passive voice in legal language. To this end, the thesis, first of all,defines passive voice in both English and Chinese. Then the author selects GATT asdata for the study of passive voice and collects quantitative data of English passivevoice. Lastly, the author would study the transformation of English passive voice intoChinese.Through the above study, the author finds out that368samples of English passivevoice in GATT are translated into56Chinese overt passive sentences,68Chinese halfovert passive sentences,75Chinese covert passive sentences and169Chinese activesentences. A contrastive study of English and Chinese passive voice contributes toexploring the innate regularities of two different languages and ultimately exposingthe commonalities and the individualities between them. It is the author’s hope thatsuch an analysis may contribute to a broader understanding of the translation ofpassive voice in legal language.