Chinese Passive Sentences Interpretation Strategies in the Perspective of Skopos Theory
Abstract
Due to different language families and cultural backgrounds, Chinese and English have much disparity, among which the passive voice is one of the most significant differences. Therefore, developing appropriate strategies for passive voice interpretation is essential. However, current translation community has relatively little research on the Chinese - English translation of passive sentences, and even the existent research on this field is not systematic. This study aims to find out common strategies for English interpretation of Chinese passive sentences (abbreviated as CPS) on the basis of Skopos Theory. The present study conducts Corpus Linguistics as the research method, and focuses on the structures, components, and semantic meanings of both source and target sentences to discuss whether the interpretation strategy employed achieved its purpose. By collecting and analyzing CPS in political speeches between 1997 and 2017 and their English interpretations from CEPIC corpus, three strategies are proposed in this study: 1) Interpreting CPS into English passive sentences; 2) Interpreting CPS into English active sentences; 3) Interpreting CPS into English structures without active or passive voice. The choice of strategy is contingent but must conforms with the translation purpose and take into consideration the target audience and target setting, so to improve the quality of interpretation activity as an efficacious trans-national communication.
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