法律英语中的被动语态及其翻译探究——从功能对等理论角度外国语言学与应用语言学专业论文.docx

ABSTRACT Accompany with the study of contrastive linguistics, many linguists make a deep comparison about the passive voice both in English and Chinese. Compared with Chinese, there are more passive voices in English; especially in News English, Scientific English and Legal English which have high requirement for objectivity and formality. As a stylistic mark, the passive voice has become a hot topic for linguists, but most of the studies base only on syntactic level; and there are not many deep studies on passive voice in legal English. Passive voice as well as its translation in legal English is an academic issue worthy of deep study, and functional equivalence theory provides a theoretical support for the passive voice translation. First of all, as one of the most important syntactic features, passive voice is widely used in legislative texts, court language and other different legal texts. There are following three reasons, the first reason is that passive voice is a grammatical label for English language; the second reason is that passive voice can make the legal English more objective and accurate; the third reason is that it can hide and weaken the performer of the action and stress the theme. Secondly, it is difficult for Chinese to understand the passive voice in English, the main reason is that English is hypotaxis-oriented, and the objective notion is frequently emphasized in its sentences; Chinese is parataxis-oriented, the subjective consciousness is usually stressed; moreover, the different language structures between Chinese and English usually cause gaps for Chinese people to comprehend the passive voice in legal English. Thirdly, the translation of passive voice can help Chinese people to comprehend foreign legal texts and overcome the difficulties in comprehension. Nida?s functional equivalence theory can be the basic theory for us to probe into the passive voice translation in legal English because it holds that the translation should not be limit