"Credit cards are not accepted here."
Translation:这里不收信用卡。
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So, the sentence literally says "This place does not accept credit cards.", right?
I suspect it doesn't have a literal subject. "Here [they] don't take credit cards." You can compare it to these sentences I found on tatoeba.org:
这里不能停车。"[You] can't park here," not "This place can't park cars." 这里无法呼吸。"[One is] unable to breathe here," not "This place is unable to breathe."
I checked a few dozen sentences and didn't see any where 这里 is unambiguously a subject.
You're on the right track. Chinese can be quite fluid in the ways it conveys these types of sentences, so 这里信用卡不收 would translate most accurately to "here, credit cards aren't taken." In certain contexts, verbs can be passive or active, like here, in special types of sentences where the topic comes first, disregarding grammar. So really, since credit cards are the topic, we might even translate it to "credit cards...here, they're not taken." Other sentences such as 这个我吃了 make 这个 the topic, and it even sounds strange to use the proper grammar in this particular case!
Chinese does have a word used to show passive voice (被), but I've so rarely heard it actually used in all my years of study and working in China.
Tl;dr...don't think about it too hard. Sometimes verbs can be flexible in the active or passive function depending on the topic construction.
My confusion is caused by the passive sentence in English where "credit cards" is the subject. In the Chinese sentence, "credit cards" seems to be the object. Can someone enlighten me?
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Its separately translated "this place no receive trust use card". So indeed the sentence is active in Chinese.
I was always told that “这／那／哪” + “里／儿” were interchangeable and matters of dialect （Beijingers tend to add a nasally r-sound to a lot more words). Is there a reason "这儿不收信用卡“ is treated as wrong?
In your sentence, 信用卡 seems to be the subject. I'm not a native speaker so let me know if this is wrong.
For a sentence like this, the Chinese way to say it doesn't use passive voice is all. When Chinese does use a passive construction you will probably find the character 被.
E.g. 那棵树被大风刮倒了
The tree was uprooted by the gale.
