The aim of this master’s dissertation was to analyse the use of the English passive voice in children’s literature and its Slovenian translational equivalents. To this end, a parallel corpus was created using as a source text Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, written by J. K. Rowling and translated into Slovenian by Jakob J. Kenda. The analysis focused on the type of English passive constructions, their form, presence of the agent in the sentence, their frequency and reasons for their use. The analysis revealed that English passives were predominately translated into Slovenian with their active counterparts. In case of agented passives, the agent in the Slovenian translation remains the subject but it was placed to the end position and thus kept in the information focus. It was established that animate agents were more likely to be retained than the inanimate ones. Agentless passives were translated more diversely. The most common strategy was to introduce a generic subject (third person plural), which performs the same function as the English agentless passive in the original. The dissertation also provides some insight into teaching English passive voice to students of English as a foreign language. As it is not a commonly used structure in the Slovenian language, the teaching of the passive voice requires special approach.
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