Methods For Translating Passive Construction In Scientific And Technical Texts From English To Chinese

Among English-Chinese translations of different texts,that of scientific and technical texts is of great significance in scientific research,theoretical research and practical application both at home and abroad.Science and technology would not have developed so well in modern China without the translation of English sci-tech works.Therefore,I believe that it is of great significance to study the E-C translation of this kind of texts.In this report,I conduct the translation practice of the Introduction and Chapter 1 of Ethics for Robots:How to Design a Moral Algorithm,which is the latest work of Derek Leben,an Associate Professor of Philosophy of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown,USA.In this work,the writer describes and defends a method for designing and evaluating ethics algorithms for autonomous machines.The sci-tech text contains the knowledge of a particular field and translating such kind of texts into Chinese is not an easy task.When I first read the book,I noticed abundant usages of English passive constructions,and it was a major challenge for me to translate these sentences into Chinese correctly and faithfully.The translation of these sentences shall be accomplished through two major processes:comprehension and representation,with the application of several translation techniques.After studying other scholars’ studies on techniques of translating English passive constructions into Chinese ones,I selected two major methods:I.Translating into Chinese active construction:(1)Translating into Chinese an active construction with the original agent to be the subject;(2)Translating into a Chinese "zero-subject" sentence(the subject ellipsis sentence)or adding a generic person as the subject if the agent is not mentioned in the original text;(3)Translating into a special kind of Chinese sentence pattern when it comes to a common passive sentence pattern in English:"it+is+Vpp+that",such as "it is said that".2.Translating into Chinese passive construction:(1)Translating into Chinese notional(unmarked)passive construction;(2)Translating into Chinese syntactic(marked)passive construction.Besides,since the source text is an informative text which is content-centered and some passive constructions cannot be translated well through the two major methods,I also supplement the methods above with another translation method—free translation.