How Animacy and Information Status Determine Word Order in Translation of the Passive Voice

English uses the passive voice more frequently than French. One method of translating the passive includes rendering the sentence as active by using an active verb, and changing the placement of the verb’s arguments. We are studying extra-syntactic features that predict where this method of translating the passive voice is used, in-cluding animacy and information status. We have obtained data from examining the Hansard, the transactions of the Canadian Parliament, which is published in both languages. This paper presents the results of a small mechanized corpus analysis on the relevance of the relative animacy of the agent (or experiencer) and the theme. This information will help to achieve desired stylistic output in a bilingual surface realizer.