A Comparison Between Chinese Bei Sentences And English Translation In Life And Death Are Wearing Me Out

The aim of this essay is to discuss the Chinese Bei sentences and English passive voice in the book Life and Death are Wearing Me Out and its English version. It focuses on Bei sentence and be done structure in English, use Government and Binding Theory to analyze the differences. The Bei sentences can be divided into two kinds: those who are translated into be done structure and those who are not.The purpose of this paper is to find out the reasons of English translation, using GB theory to discuss the differences between Chinese and English.The main structure is as followed: at first it defined the Chinese Bei sentences and English be done structure, then the origin, development and semantic features of them. The second part gave a brief introduction of GB theory. In the third part, showed data of Chinese Bei sentences in the novel, the first type is those Bei sentences that have been translated into be done structure in English, the other type is those haven’t been translated into be done structure in English, then use the GB theory to analyze the reason why the translator choose to interpret the sentences like so.According to the data, there are 589 Bei sentences in the novel, of which translated into be done structure only cover 190. GB theory is accounting for the linguistic reasons, and hopefully this paper can offer help to the other researchers.