| Pages in topic: < [1 2] | Has the Word 2003 a bee in the bonnet about the passive voice in its spellcheck? Thread poster: Narasimhan Raghavan
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Ty Kendall 
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:30
Hebrew to English
| Pragmatic reasons | Sep 8, 2011 |
I'm a bit late to the party but here's my input...
English also avoids the passive for very basic pragmatic reasons. Anyone remember Grice and his maxims?
Grice's maxim of Manner is especially relevant here (be clear - avoid ambiguity, be brief, avoid obscurity of expression).
English is a language which holds brevity and clarity in high regard and has far less tolerance of repetition and vagueness than other languages.
The passive, by its very... See more I'm a bit late to the party but here's my input...
English also avoids the passive for very basic pragmatic reasons. Anyone remember Grice and his maxims?
Grice's maxim of Manner is especially relevant here (be clear - avoid ambiguity, be brief, avoid obscurity of expression).
English is a language which holds brevity and clarity in high regard and has far less tolerance of repetition and vagueness than other languages.
The passive, by its very nature (in English) is more verbose and often serves the purpose of obscuring the agent or other information.
Whilst it cannot be avoided in many contexts, the natural inclination of an English-speaker is to avoid it wherever possible.
There's nothing wrong with it as such, it is merely a matter of innate language-specific preferences. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dave Bindon
Greece
Local time: 09:30
Greek to English
In memoriam
...to the party. Better late than never!
"The passive, by its very nature (in English) is more verbose..."
So true. Greek single-word (medio-)passive verbs tend to make phrases shorter and more comprehensible than the equivalent phrase rendered in the active voice, so their use makes perfect sense in Greek; in English translations, however, most need to be changed.
"be clear - avoid ambiguity, be brief, avoid obscurity of expression"
Oh, pleas... See more ...to the party. Better late than never!
"The passive, by its very nature (in English) is more verbose..."
So true. Greek single-word (medio-)passive verbs tend to make phrases shorter and more comprehensible than the equivalent phrase rendered in the active voice, so their use makes perfect sense in Greek; in English translations, however, most need to be changed.
"be clear - avoid ambiguity, be brief, avoid obscurity of expression"
Oh, please tell Greek lawyers, scientists and doctors that! I swear they get paid per word they write, with bonuses for the use of the passive voice and deductions for the use of full stops. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Oliver Walter
United Kingdom
Local time: 07:30
German to English
+ ...
| Passive can be good | Sep 9, 2011 |
In a translation that I completed this week (about 2000 words), I wrote the following passive sentences (these are from 3 separate places in the document):
- These thin substrates are used in the semiconductor industry.
- Products and components are developed in-house up to the prototype stage.
- Product development has been commissioned at XX for the production of such a YY.
I consider that I wrote in a good style and would not consider the followin... See more In a translation that I completed this week (about 2000 words), I wrote the following passive sentences (these are from 3 separate places in the document):
- These thin substrates are used in the semiconductor industry.
- Products and components are developed in-house up to the prototype stage.
- Product development has been commissioned at XX for the production of such a YY.
I consider that I wrote in a good style and would not consider the following active versions to be any better (perhaps worse, in fact):
- The semiconductor industry uses these thin substrates.
- The company does in-house development of products and components up to the prototype stage.
- The company has commissioned product development at XX for the production of such a YY.
Part of the reason is the emphasis: My passive example 1 is a statement about these thin substrates (in which the reader is probably interested); the active version is a statement about the semiconductor industry (of less interest).
My example 3 is a statement about product development (might be interesting); the active version is a statement about the company (not so interesting at this point).
I use Word2000, and although grammar checking is turned on in the spellcheck, it didn't warn me about any of these. If it had, I would just have ignored those warnings.
Tony's first reply contained the following perfectly good piece of text in the passive: "the passive voice is certainly used a lot less than it once would have been". Maybe my example is one of the cases that, as he then wrote, do often use the passive.
Oliver ▲ Collapse
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