A Corpus-Based Study on the Translation of Passive Sentences in Legal Text

Abstract

The paper analyses the use of the passive sentences in legal text and explores some translation method and strategy from the perspective of Functional Approach and Skopostheorie, following a corpus-based quantitative analysis of 12 English-Chinese parallel legal texts. Research findings show that during the process of passive sentences translation, the translator must consider the differences of Chinese and English languages, and pay attention to the special features in legal text in order to realize the closest functional equivalence.