Spoken versus Written: A Register Variation Analysis on the Use of the Passive Voice in Student Sight and Written Translations

This paper focuses on a register variation analysis that was carried out on the use of verbs in the passive voice in sight translations (i.e. the oral translations of a written text) and written translations made by Master students translating from English into French. In fact, studies have shown that students may find the transposition of register (i.e. “a language variety associated with both a particular situation of use and with pervasive linguistic features that serve important functions within that situation of use” (Biber & Conrad, 2009, p. 31)) from one language to another difficult because of the differences between English and French registers. For instance, Fawcett (1997), Gile (2005) and Vandaele (2015) have observed that even if students may often feel that language needs to be adapted according to register variables (the target audience, the text function, etc.), many fail to do this successfully in written translation.
This analysis was conducted on the passive voice of verbs, which “rearranges” the communication (Riegel et al., 1994/2018, p. 666): the patient (affected by the action) is syntactically realised as the subject and becomes the “focused topic” of the sentence while the agent (instigating the action), if not completely removed, is “downgraded” (Van Hell et al., 2005, p. 244). In other words, the passive voice influences the organisation of the message and may be considered as a genre- or register-specific feature (Jisa et al., 2002; Van Hell et al., 2005). From this point of view, the analysis of the passive voice appears relevant to a register variation analysis.
Another factor that was taken into account in this analysis was the modes of speech, i.e. written and sight translations. In fact, since a register is determined by the mode in which a message is produced, this analysis aims at observing whether students used the passive voice in written and sight translations differently. It is important to emphasise that many consider that sight translation “must ‘sound’ like the result of an oral communication and not like a written text” (Weber, 1990, p. 4).
The two research questions of this paper are the following:
1) To which extent does register have an influence on the use of passive voice in the students’ translations?
2) Is the use of the passive voice different in written translations and in sight translations?
In order to answer those questions, two registers (a press article from The Economist (R1) and a popular science article from New Scientist (R2)) that are taught to Master students at University of Mons, Belgium, are compared, since a register analysis implies the analysis of at least two registers (Neumann, 2021). Four “multiple translation corpora” (i.e. corpora containing several translations of the same source texts (Granger & Lefer, 2020, p. 1186)) were thus compiled:
• a corpus of 14 written translations of R1
• a corpus of 17 sight translations of R1
• a corpus of 14 written translations of R2
• a corpus of 17 sight translations of R2.
The verbs used in the passive voice (VPV) in the translations were extracted by using the Corpus Query Language of the Sketch Engine concordancer (Kilgarriff et al., 2014). They were then analysed in the R software (R Core Team, 2020) (in the RStudio environment (Allaire, 2020)).
Results from the analysis of written translations in R1 and R2 show that there is a significant difference in active and passive voices according to registers (χ² (1) = 56.282, p < 0.005). Respectively, 51.1% and 100% of VPV in R1 and R2 are added by the students in their translations.
Results from the analysis of sight translations in R1 and R2 also show that there is a significant difference in active and passive voices according to registers (χ² (1) = 82.445, p < 0.005). Respectively, 52.2% and 100% of VPV in R1 and R2 are added by the students in their translations as well.
Results from the comparison between written and sight translations show that there is no significant difference in active and passive voices according to the mode of translation in both registers (χ² (1) = 0.43614, p = 0.509 in R1; χ² (1) = 0.00011411, p = 0.9915 in R2). In other words, the students’ translations do not seem to be influenced by the mode of the message.
From a qualitative point of view, results show that 92.75% of VPV used in the sight translations are the same VPV used in the written translations in R1, while none of the VPV used in the sight translations corresponds to the VPV used in the written translations in R2. Therefore, in our corpora, students seem to use the VPV in a more homogeneous way in their translations of the press article than in their translations of the popular science article.
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