Original scientific paper

Passive- and passive-like constructions in the translation of a Croatian legislative text into English

Božana Knežević ; Faculty of Maritime Studies, University of Rijeka
Irena Brdar ; Faculty of Maritime Studies, University of Rijeka

Abstract

This paper is based on the study of the translation pairs of passive sentences found
in two legislative texts, a corpus of 23,140 words. The two texts are used to determine
the passive voice frequency and retention or change in the grammatical
(passive and passive-like) and thematic structures of extracted passive sentences
in the Croatian (source) and English (target) texts. While English in the legislative
text and official document shows a bias in favour of the passive periphrastic,
Croatian mainly retains the se passive. The main conclusion of the study confirms
the hypothesis that a change in the grammatical structure does not always trigger a
change in the thematic structure. In a number of cases it is the word order that
shows the function of thematic shift and not the passive.

Keywords

translation; passive; passive-like construction; thematic structure; legal discourse

Hrčak ID:

59480

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/59480

Publication date:

20.10.2010.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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