Translating passives from English into Swedish: patterns of non-passive correspondences

Seminarium

Grammatikseminariet

Abstract
My research focuses on passive constructions in English and Swedish from a translation perspective. In broad terms, the aim is to describe the passive domain and its relations to neighbouring structures. The study is based on translation data from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC), from which I extracted a large number of passives from original texts in both languages, and looked at how they are translated. The bidirectional translation patterns that emerge will shed light on both the language systems as regards voice-related phenomena and on the translation strategies used for translating passives.

In this seminar I would like to discuss on-going work on non-congruent translations of English source text passives, i.e. instances in which the translators chose a non-passive structure in the Swedish translations.