Strategies for Translating English Passive Sentences into Vietnamese

Xuan My Nguyen

doi:10.54855/ijte22216

Abstract

This study examines some most common strategies for the Vietnamese translation of English passive voice such as “The use of markers ‘được’/‘bị’”, “Change to active”, “Paraphrasing” in order to find out the frequency and the rules for the use of those strategies by collecting and analyzing the data from the English and Vietnamese versions of a novel named “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” and a book named “A Brief History of Time”. And the findings of this study disapproves the view that Vietnamese active sentences are the dominant choice for translating English passive voice since its results indicate that English It-clefts or English agentless passive sentences where the agent of the action is unclear or concerned with generalization rather than specific individuals have a high tendency of being translated into active structures in Vietnamese while using a marker like 'được' or 'bị' and subject-less active sentences are the primary ways for translating other kinds of English agentless passive sentences into Vietnamese. Besides, the results of the research also indicate that the use of markers 'được'/'bị' is frequently applied to translate agent-included passives, but the position of the agent in Vietnamese sentences varies according to its features.

Highlights

Passive voice is used frequently in many varieties of written English, but the structural differences between English passive sentences and the corresponding structures in Vietnamese are assumed to pose various problems for English - Vietnamese learners since they belong to "a hierarchy of difficulty by which a teacher or linguist can make a prediction of the relative difficulty of a given aspect of the second language" (Stockwell et al, 1965, as cited in Mohammad, 2012, p.16)
This research examines 672 collected English passives, and its findings indicate that using a maker "bị" or "được" is the most predominant strategy for the Vietnamese translation
This strategy is almost used for both agent-included passives and agentless passives in English whose subjects are anaphoric reference items and have a tight connection with the previous sentence, while the active strategy is normally used for English passives whose agents are animate and when the passives are in the first sentence of a paragraph or when their subjects are not closely linked with the participants in the preceding sentence

Summary

Introduction

Passive voice is used frequently in many varieties of written English, but the structural differences between English passive sentences and the corresponding structures in Vietnamese are assumed to pose various problems for English - Vietnamese learners since they belong to "a hierarchy of difficulty by which a teacher or linguist can make a prediction of the relative difficulty of a given aspect of the second language" (Stockwell et al, 1965, as cited in Mohammad, 2012, p.16). English passive structures can be translated into active https://i-jte.org. Nguyen Xuan My structures or "a neutral structure" (Bui, 2005; Luu, 2010; Le, Nguyen, & Vu, 2016). This paper examines some most common strategies for translating English passive voice into Vietnamese and the rules for the use of these strategies and introduces general procedures for the Vietnamese translation of English passives (here called "Vietnamese translation") by gathering and analyzing the full form of English passive sentences collected from English and Vietnamese versions of a novel called "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (abbreviated to "Harry Potter") and a book named "A Brief History of Time"

Objectives

Methods

Findings

Conclusion