Voice Structure Analysis in Chinese-English Translation at Sentence and Text Levels

• Main Authors: Shih En Lin, 林詩恩
• Other Authors: shuming chen
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2008
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/51436850286432587991

碩士 === 大葉大學 === 應用外語研究所 === 96 === This thesis focuses on pure translation studies for describing and explaining translation phenomena, looking at translation from contrastive linguistics and language communicative functional angles. This thesis has two purposes. The first purpose is to use two translation theories, i.e. Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1958/95) translation approach and Catford’s (1965) translation approach to analyze the voice translation between Chinese and English on the sentence level. The second purpose is to use Reiss’s text type theory (1977/89) to analyze the shift of text types in voice structure translating between Chinese and English texts. This thesis has four findings. First, Vinay and Darbelnet’s translation strategy, modulation, is used on voice structure translation when English passive voice is translated into Chinese active voice or vice versa, but Catford does not have a similar strategy like modulation. Second, transposition of Vinay and Darbelnet and class shift of Catford are similar strategies by applying to voice structure translation between English and Chinese. Third, the application of textual equivalence, level shift and literal translation has overlaps on voice structure analysis. Fourth, when the text type is informative and the text variety is scientific texts in English and Chinese, the passive verb is often used in English and the active verb is commonly used in Chinese. Moreover, when the text type is informative and the text variety is abstract texts in English and Chinese, the active verbs may be used in both English and Chinese.