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Passive- and passive-like constructions in the translation of a Croatian legislative text into English
E-mail: bknez@pfri.hr
Faculty of Maritime Studies, University of Rijeka
Faculty of Maritime Studies, University of Rijeka
Jezikoslovlje.11.025_Knezevic_Brdar.pdf [ 0.16 MB - English]
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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.
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