A Variationist Study of Bei Passives in Translated Texts Across the Taiwan Strait: The Application of Variable Rule Analysis to Descriptive Translation
Abstract：Abstract: In this paper, bei passives are taken as a case study to address the issues of explicitation and implicitation in translated Chinese, examine universals and particulars of variations of bei passives as reflected in the Chinese Mainland and Taiwan communities, and discuss the factors that condition the translation strategies of English passive structures. An English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Popular Science was employed, thus enabling the comparisons between English and translated Chinese and between two translated Chinese. Besides, variable rule analysis, which is specific to sociolinguistics， was also used. The findings show that implicitation is more striking as opposed to explicitation. There is an overwhelming convergence in either the passive variants or variations in two Chinese translated texts. The multi-variate results also reveal that translation strategies are significantly influenced by the prototypical features of bei passives, i.e., the negative semantic prosody, the personality of patient and the presence of agent.
Key words: bei passives; variation; translation; variable rule analysis
