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

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.