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Here's an example:

みなさんに愛される人。

Does this mean, "the person that everyone loves," or "the person that loves everybody?"

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Babylon translates it as "The person who is loved by all of you" ;) – Lukman Oct 23 '11 at 4:21
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Also, you should already be able to translate に+passive pattern since you already asked a similar question and got the answer from sawa's comment there. X+に+passive is simply is <passiveverb> by X. – Lukman Oct 23 '11 at 5:34
It's not clear. X+に+passive = passive X? – language hacker Oct 24 '11 at 22:52

1 Answer

up vote 5 down vote

The person that is loved by everyone.

It's just a basic relative clause, no magic involved.

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I'm curious as to why the English passive never made its way into the translations in the question... – Hyperworm Oct 23 '11 at 5:12
@Hyperworm Probably because active verbs sound more natural in English and the meaning is the same anyway. – Chris Frederick Oct 24 '11 at 6:56
@Chris true, but only if you can get the subject and object the right way around when converting from passive to active, which seems to have been the OP's difficulty. Solution: don't skip steps: we explicitly state that the person is loved, and therefore it's everyone who loves. – Karl Knechtel Oct 26 '11 at 11:42
@KarlKnechtel Ah, fair enough. I used to get the subject and object mixed up in phrases that used the verb 含まれる, too. Still, once you're proficient enough in the language, I think that it makes more sense to replace passive verbs with active verbs whenever possible. – Chris Frederick Oct 26 '11 at 15:31

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