Passivkonstruktionen in der akademischen Sprache : am Beispiel einer Übersetzung aus dem Deutschen ins Schwedische

Academic scientific language is characterized by an impersonal and objective style. Due to this and the typical high information density of academic language, this style typically contains a high rate of noun phrases and passive structures. This is also true for the German scientific study Gefühlte Opfer, Illusionen der Vergangenheitsbewältigung by Ulrike Jureit and Christian Schneider. The first aim of this essay was to translate one chapter from the aforementioned book into Swedish and adapt the target language to culturally match a reader who would appreciate a text on German post-war history and sociology. The second aim was to quantify and analyse all occurrences of passive voice and similar structures. More specifically, the following research questions were investigated: How is the passive formed in the source and target language respectively? How often is a corresponding passive used in the translation? How often is a passive sentence translated into an active structure? There are many different ways of expressing the passive in German: the so-called Vorgangspassiv featuring the auxiliary werden, the so-called Zustandspassiv with sein, and finally passive-like constructions. There are corresponding ways to form the passive in Swedish, that is, structures with the auxiliaries bli and vara, but the more common way to express the passive voice is the morphological s-passive. Passive-like constructions can be found in Swedish as well. The most common passive structure in the source text, the werden-passive, was in most cases translated into the typical Swedish s-passive. The sein-passive was more often translated into a similar structure in the target text. All in all, almost a third of the passive voice sentences were translated into active structures. Keywords: translation, passive voice, academic languag