Пассивная форма имеет чрезвычайно широкое распространение в английском научно-техническом языке.

Пассивная форма в некоторых отношениях отличается от русского страдательного залога, который употребляется значительно реже, уступая место иным выразительным средствам языка.

Это обстоятельство создает известную трудность для переводчика и требует сопоставления пассива и аналогичных ему оборотов русского языка.

Пассивной формой (страдательным залогом) мы называем такую конструкцию предложения, при которой подлежащее не является действующим лицом (или предметом), а само подвергается действию со стороны дополнения (при этом дополнение может лишь подразумеваться, не будучи выражено в предложении):

Сказуемое в пассивной форме состоит из вспомогательного глагола to be в соответствующем времени и причастия прошедшего времени смыслового глагола.

При превращении активного оборота в пассивный, прямое дополнение активного оборота становится подлежащим пассивного, а подлежащее активного оборота превращается в дополнение с предлогом by:

Поскольку подлежащее пассивного оборота является, по существу объектом действия, очевидно, что в пассивной форме могут употребляться только переходные глаголы, т.е. такие глаголы, действие которых переходит на объект, выраженный прямым дополнением, например:

До сих пор мы имеем аналогию между английской пассивной формой и русским страдательным залогом.

Нужно учитывать, что кроме прямо-переходных глаголов, требующих прямого дополнения, существуют т.н. косвенно-переходные глаголы, которые, в интересах полноты выражения мысли, также требуют наличия объекта действия, но этот объект стоит не в винительном, а в одном из косвенных падежей (родительном, дательном, творительном), например:

Очень часто косвенно-переходные глаголы сопровождаются дополнением с предлогом:

В русском языке только прямо-переходные глаголы употребляются в страдательном залоге, а косвенно-переходные глаголы, вместо этого, принимают форму неопределенно-личной конструкции:

В отличие от этого, в английском языке в пассивной форме могут употребляться не только прямо-переходные, но и косвенно-переходные глаголы:

Особенно часто употребляются в следующие косвенно-переходные глаголы:

В пассивной конструкции предлог сохраняет свое место после глагола, но относится к пассивному подлежащему:

Как отмечалось выше, перевод таких конструкций должен производиться с помощью неопределенно-личной формы.

Однако если в пассивной конструкции имеется упоминание о действующем лице (или предмете), выраженное дополнением с предлогом by, то перевод неопределенно-личной формой становится невозможным и мы можем передать смысл лишь с помощью предложения в действительном залоге:

Второе различие английской формы и русского страдательного залога заключается в следующем:

В английском языке не только прямое (или предложное косвенное), но также и беспредложное косвенное дополнение может стать подлежащим пассивного оборота после некоторых глаголов (to give, to pay, to order, to tell, to show и др.)

Таким образом, если в активной форме имеется два дополнения - прямое и беспредложное косвенное, то любое из них может выполнять функцию подлежащего в пассивном обороте; так, например, предложение:

в котором:

a book - прямое дополнение, тогда как him - беспредложное косвенное дополнение, может быть перестроено в пассивную форму двумя параллельными способами:

Перевод предложений, в которых в виде подлежащего выступает бывшее косвенное дополнение, может быть также произведен двумя способами.

Неопределенно-личной формой (при отсутствии указания на действующее лицо):

Предложением в действительном залоге (при наличии действующего лица):

Третье отличие английской пассивной формы от русского страдательного залога состоит в том, что некоторые английские переходные глаголы имеют в русском языке эквиваленты в виде непереходных глаголов, например:

Пассивные конструкции с этими глаголами могут переводиться двумя способами.

Неопределенно - личной формой (при отсутствии дополнения с предлогом by):

Действительным залогом (при наличии указания на действующее лицо):

Подводя итоги сказанному можно отметить, что сфера применения пассивной формы (страдательного залога) в английском языке гораздо шире, чем в русском вследствие того, что значительно большее количество английских глаголов способны выражать категорию пассивности. Это приводит к тому, что любой вид английского дополнения - прямое, предложное косвенное, беспредложное косвенное - может выступать в качестве подлежащего пассивного оборота, тогда как в русском языке эта функция присуща лишь прямому дополнению.

Более того - некоторые непереходные глаголы при наличии предложного обстоятельства сходного по форме с предложным дополнением, могут, по аналогии, выступать в пассивной форме, причем обстоятельство выполняет в ней функцию подлежащего:

Отсюда возникает многообразие возможностей передачи на русском языке английской пассивной конструкции; эти возможности можно свести к четырем основным способам перевода.

Конструкцией, аналогичной пассивной конструкции английского предложения, т.е. с помощью глагола быть и краткой формы страдательного причастия (в настоящем времени глагол быть опускается):

Глаголами, оканчивающимися на -ся:

Неопределенно-личным оборотом в действительном залоге (в 3-м лице множественного числа) с дополнением в винительном или дательном падеже:

Действительным залогом (возможно только при наличии указания на действующее лицо):

Нужно учитывать, что английская пассивная конструкция может нередко быть передана не одним, а двумя или тремя указанными выше способами.

Выбор в таком случае должен диктоваться соображениями стиля.

Пассивная форма, особенно часто встречающаяся в английских специальных текстах, употребляется вместо активной в следующих случаях:

а) Когда активное подлежащее, выполняющее данное действие неизвестно, или не может быть выражено:

б) Когда активное подлежащее намеренно опускается, т. к. основная мысль высказывания связана с пассивным подлежащим:

в) В тех случаях, когда активное подлежащее хотя и не опускается, но автор желает выделить не его, а пассивное подлежащее:

Примеры перевода пассивной формы:

Упражнения

I. Переведите следующие предложения:

1. The Leningrad metro was being constructed when the Great Patriotic war broke up. 2. In Soviet times Tsiolkovsky's ideas were recognised and he was given state support. 3. We were told about the sad state of art in eastern regions. 4. The lightness of hydrogen is made use of in the filling of balloons. 5. Safety and protection for the people working around the atomic reactor are provided by a mass of reinforced concrete, 8 feet thick. 6. Radio sets are provided for in all sea going vessels. 7. The discovery of radium was followed by a number of important inventions. 8. The current is measured with the ammeter. 9. The expedition was given a very difficult task. 10. The balloon has been lost sight of. 11. This problem may be approached from different standpoints. 12. Spanish is spoken in South America. 13. His words were followed by a deep silence.

1. The question of further development of agriculture was given much attention. 2. The trajectory of a projectile is affected to a large extent by air resistance. 3. We are taught that light is a form of energy. 4. A floating body is acted upon by two sets of forces. 5. This project must be given due consideration. 6. 65.4 parts of zinc and 2 parts of hydrogen are spoken of as chemically equivalent quantities. 7. No electric charges have ever been observed of smaller magnitude than the charges of proton or electron. 8. Nuclear reactor is provided with a concrete shielding. 9. The Conference was attended by 150 delegates. 10. The speaker was listened to attentively. 11. We were given an exceptionally warm welcome by Zulu students. 12. Have you been brought a newspaper? 13. Potatoes were brought to Europe by Columbus.

II. Переведите текст; выделите в тексте случаи употребления пассивной формы и дайте возможные варианты перевода:

COAL

It has been proved that all coals had their origin in the vegetable matter of prehistoric forests. The woody fiber and other vegetable matter were transformed into peat by fermentation due to bacteria. During this process, a great part of the oxygen and hydrogen was eliminated, while the amount of carbon remained practically the same. Subsequently the peaty matter was changed into coal by a process of destructive distillation, which had been caused by great pressure and high temperature. The differences in types of coal can be easily explained by different conditions during this process of evolution. Among these variable conditions by which the formation of coal had been affected the following may be mentioned: time, depth of the bed below the surface of the earth, and amount of disturbance of the bed due to movements of the earth.

Foreign matter was introduced during this movement of the earth. Coal is composed of the following principal elements: carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and sulphur. However, these are not present solely in their elementary state, but also in various combinations, principally moisture and volatile matter. Consequently, coal is classified into various types according to its constituents; some of these types will be mentioned below.

Peat is an intermediate condition between wood and coal. It is often used as fuel in the Temperate Zone, where it is found in large quantities in the swampy regions. It is commonly cut into blocks and dried in the air.

Bituminous coal is the name which is usually given to coal containing more than 20 per cent volatile matter. Bituminous coal is not susceptible to spontaneous combustion, although care must be exercised in its storage. Since there is a wide range of variation in the characteristics of the bituminous coals, they have been divided commercially into the following classes: coking, cannel, and non-coking. Coking coal, upon being burned gives off considerable gas and tends to fuse together in a pasty mass (coke). Cannel coal has a high percentage of volatile hydrocarbons, ignites easily and is so valuable as a gas-producing coal that it is rarely burned to produce steam.

Non-coking coal does not coke upon being burned and is very extensively used as a fuel to produce steam.

Практикум

THE FIRST ENTANGLEMENT OF THREE PHOTONS has been experimentally demonstrated by researchers at the University of Innsbruck. Individually, an entangled particle has properties (such as momentum) that are indeterminate and undefined until the particle is measured or otherwise disturbed. Measuring one entangled particle, however, defines its properties and seems to influence the properties of its partner or partners instantaneously, even if they are light years apart. In the present experiment, sending individual photons through a special crystal sometimes converted a photon into two pairs of entangled photons. After detecting a "trigger" photon, and interfering two of the three others in a beamsplitter, it became impossible to determine which photon came from which entangled pair. As a result, the respective properties of the three remaining photons were indeterminate, which is one way of saying that they were entangled (the first such observation for three physically separated particles). The researchers deduced that this entangled state is the long-coveted GHZ state proposed by physicists Daniel Greenberger, Michael Horne, and Anton Zeilinger in the late 1980s. In addition to facilitating more advanced forms of quantum cryptography, the GHZ state will help provide a nonstatistical test of the foundations of quantum mechanics. Albert Einstein, troubled by some implications of quantum science, believed that any rational description of nature is incomplete unless it is both a local and realistic theory: "realism" refers to the idea that a particle has properties that exist even before they are measured, and "locality" means that measuring one particle cannot affect the properties of another, physically separated particle faster than the speed of light. But quantum mechanics states that realism; locality - or both - must be violated. Previous experiments have provided highly convincing evidence against local realism, but these "Bell's inequalities" tests require the measurement of many pairs of entangled photons to build up a body of statistical evidence against the idea. In contrast, studying a single set of properties in the GHZ particles (not yet reported) could verify the predictions of quantum mechanics while contradicting those of local realism.

A NEW ONLINE EXHIBIT DEVOTED TO WERNER HEISENBERG traces the birth of quantum mechanics, the wartime effort to build a German atom bomb, and other episodes from a remarkable life. Prepared by leading Heisenberg biographer David Cassidy, the exhibit is available now on the website (www.aip.org/history/heisenberg) of the Center for History of Physics, the premier clearinghouse of physics-related archived papers, photos, and taped interviews (3000 hours' worth). Located at the American Institute of Physics in College Park, Maryland, the Center houses the Niels Bohr Library, strong in books from the mid-19th century to the present, and the Emilio Segre Visual Archives (containing 25,000 items).

The Center itself possesses several valuable collections of papers and provides support to other institutions in their efforts to archive the papers of important physicists. The Center has a prominent place on the Internet (www.aip.org/history), where it maintains the International Catalogue of Sources for History of Physics and Allied Sciences. In addition to the Heisenberg site, the Center website is also home to two other widely popular exhibits, one devoted to Albert Einstein and one to JJ Thomson's discovery of the electron. Soon an exhibit devoted to Andrei Sakharov will also be available.

LIGHT HAS BEEN SLOWED TO A SPEED OF 17 m/sec by passing it through a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) of sodium atoms at nK temperatures. In general light is slowed in certain materials, a property exploited in making optical lenses. As the index of refraction of these materials gets higher, however, absorption increasingly takes its toll on the light beam. In an experiment at Harvard, physicists have used a BEC (and its enormous index of refraction) as the optical medium, but with the following important modification. They contrived a system of laser beams whose pattern of interference created an effect called electromagnetically induced transparency, allowing light to propagate unabsorbed but at greatly reduced speeds, in this case a factor of twenty million compared to the speed of light in vacuum; greater light-speed slow downs are expected, to as low as cm/sec. The researchers also observed unprecedentedly large intensity-dependent light transmission. Such an extreme nonlinear effect can perhaps be used in a number of opto-electronic components (switches, memory, delay lines) and in converting light from one wavelength to another.

TUNABLE X-RAY WAVEGUIDE WITH AN AIR GAP. At synchrotron light sources, electron beams make floods of x-rays, which must be tamed before they can be used in experiments where typically they probe the structure of some tiny biological sample. One of the ways to focus the beam onto the sample is to compress it and guide the x-rays through a thin strip of material sandwiched between reflecting surfaces. Usually the guiding material, often carbon, absorbs a substantial portion of the x-rays. Researchers at the University of Amsterdam have now produced a waveguide out of two parallel reflecting plates with only air in between. This not only greatly reduces x ray losses but also, when the gap is filled with liquid, permits the x-ray study of lubricants and colloids. In optics geometry is destiny; the coherent wave pattern in the Amsterdam device can be tuned by prising apart the two flat plates which form the body of the waveguide. For the whole process to work the plates (only about 250 nm apart) must be extremely parallel, the equivalent of suspending one soccer field over another at a height of about 5-mm.

A TWO-DIMENSIONAL BOSE - EINSTEIN CONDENSATE (BEC) has been observed by a University of Turku (Finland) - Kurchatov Institute (Russia) collaboration. The condensate occurred in hydrogen atoms sitting on top of a layer of liquid helium-4 at a temperature of 120-200 mK (Safonov et al., Physical Review Letters, 23 November 1998). Strong magnetic fields force the nuclei and electron spins of the hydrogen atoms to align. Magnetic fields also help to herd the atoms together into a small portion of the helium surface, achieving the density needed to begin the process of atom overlap at the heart of the BEC process. Explanations for this type of 2D-quantum fluid are lacking. (Physics World, Feb 1999.) 

Clinton Seeks Ban on Child Labor

By ALEXANDER G. HIGGINS
June 16, 1999

GENEVA (AP) - On the opening of a week-long European trip, President Clinton is seeking a worldwide agreement to ban the most egregious cases of child labor, such as preteens working in bondage, handling toxic substances or being indentured to companies that make hand-knotted carpets.

Clinton begins his trip with a speech in Switzerland today urging the International Labor Organization to work toward abolishing such child labor practices as forced labor and slavery. The organization, an arm of the United Nations, estimates that at least 250 million children, ages 5 to 14, work in developing countries - nearly half of them full time and tens of millions under exploitative and harmful conditions.

On Thursday, Clinton is to meet with leaders in France and then depart for Germany to attend the 25th annual economic summit of the world's seven richest nations, joined by Russia, where discussion over three days will range from peacekeeping in Kosovo to overhauling the global financial system.

On Monday, Clinton is to attend a U.S.-European Union summit and then travel to Slovenia, a country slightly smaller than New Jersey that declared its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and wants to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the EU, which is striving to foster political cooperation and economic integration among European nations.

As the first U.S. president to address the labor organization convention, Clinton is expected to expand on remarks he made at a University of Chicago commencement on Saturday. That same day he signed an executive order directing U.S. government agencies to make sure they do not buy products made by forced or indentured child workers.

"People will say 'Well, we're a poor country. We have to earn money however we can," Clinton told the graduates. "If you could see the conditions these 8- and 9-year-old children are working in. If you want them to go to school. If you understand those countries will never grow until they begin to educate their children, we have to start with the abolition of child labor."

In 1997, the U.S. government bought $57 million in products made by industries known to rely on child labor, according to Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, the leading Senate proponent of child-labor reform and who is accompanying Clinton on the trip. The Clinton administration has identified several problem industries, including carpets and bricks from India and Pakistan; fishing platforms from Indonesia; and fireworks from Guatemala.

The economic summit that begins Friday in Cologne, Germany, will be a meeting of the Group of Eight, comprising leaders of Russia, the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Canada. The leaders are to discuss who will pay to rebuild Kosovo and help neighboring Balkan countries following NATO's 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia.

"We welcome the European Union's intention to assume the lion's share of the financial burden and, given the U.S. role in the military campaign, this is an appropriate division of labor," Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said Monday.

Other topics to be broached include human rights, the environment, trade, terrorism, drug trafficking and crime. The leaders are to consider proposals urging developing nations to be more forthcoming in revealing their finances and complete work on a plan to provide more debt relief to poor nations.

Clinton was accompanied on the trip by his wife, Hillary, and daughter, Chelsea.  

Americans vs. Japanese

The Americans and the Japanese decided to engage in a competitive boat race. Both teams practiced hard and long to reach their peak performance.

On the big day they felt ready. The Japanese won by a mile. Afterward, the American team was discouraged by the loss. Morale sagged. Corporate management decided that the reason for the crushing defeat had to be found, so a consulting firm was hired to investigate the problem and recommended corrective action. The consultant's finding: The Japanese team had eight people rowing and one person steering; the American team had one person rowing and eight people steering.

After a year of study and millions spent analyzing the problem, the consultant firm concluded that too many people were steering and not enough were rowing on the American team.

So as race day neared again the following year, the American team's management structure was completely reorganized. The new structure: four steering managers, three area steering managers and a new performance review system for the person rowing the boat to provide work incentive.

The next year, the Japanese won by two miles. Humiliated, the American corporation laid off the rower for poor performance and gave the managers a bonus for discovering the problem....

Success always occurs in private, and failure in full view.Quality of Life

The American investment banker was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.

The Mexican replied, only a little while.

The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish?

The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs.

The American then asked, "but what do you do with the rest of your time?"

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life."

The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But, how long will this all take?"

To which the American replied, "15-20 years."

"But what then?"

The American laughed and said that's the best part. "When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions."

"Millions.. Then what?"

The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

The life which is unexamined is not worth living.
- Plato (428-348? BC)

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