| With the accelerated speed of globalization and rapid development of science, new information of various disciplines is blowing up in a fantastic rate. And the latest achievements in the developing process are to be shared on a global scale, therefore, worldwide academic exchanges become increasingly frequent. English abstract, being an essential part of most research papers, is regarded as a ―bridge‖ in the process of international information transmission and academic communication, since readers home and abroad can sort out needed research papers only by a speedy look at the abstracts. Obviously, the quality of an English abstract will greatly affect the degree of spreading and acceptance of a research article. In view of the vital role played by English abstracts in the process of academic exchanges, many scholars at home and abroad focused their studies on abstracts writing and translation, and the results were fruitful. Generally speaking, previous researches mainly concerned two aspects, namely the characteristics of abstracts and the specific translation strategies to be applied. To be specific, the scholars at home and abroad carried out their studies primarily from three levels(word, sentence, and discourse) and certain translation strategies and translation principles were put forward on the basis of these analyses. An overview of related literature, however, revealed that systemic researches as to abstracts on medical journals are still rare. As a branch of scientific genre, abstract for medical research articles possesses certain features which can distinguish it from other disciplines, for instance, in the choice of words and sentence patterns, and in the organizing of the whole structure, etc. Thus, it would undoubtedly be of great help for improving the quality of English abstracts writing and translation if a systemic study could be conducted. In addition, with the booming of corpus approach, researches based on corpus are also gradually emerging in translation study, which provides a new perspective for the empirical translation study.In the present study, 50 abstracts with both Chinese version and corresponding translated English version were chosen from the top 10 domestic medical journals on CNKI according to the comprehensive index rank, and two subcorpora( Subcorpus of Translated English Abstracts, TEA; Subcorpus of Chinese Abstracts, CA) were established. Fifty English abstracts written by native speakers, chosen from international medical journals included by Springer Link database, constituted Subcorpus of Original English Abstracts, OEA. The software Ant Conc3.2.1. was employed to assist in the process of data calculating. The comparison was made between subcorpus TEA and subcorpus OEA on lexical level and syntactic level. Certain translational strategies were suggested with an attempt to solve some of the problems found in the study.The author found that a great difference exists between the two groups in the aspect of abstract length with an average token number of 346.88 in TEA and 239.66 in OEA. The type-token ratio comparison shows abstracts in OEA have more words variance than that in TEA. Besides, the two corpora show a high similarity in high-frequency words, and noticeable difference only exists in the use of articles. Modal verbs comparison demonstrated that Chinese authors like to use ―can‖, and ―could‖ in their writing, while the native authors prefer to use ―may‖. Moreover, the modal verbs in OEA are used more diversely than that in TEA. On the syntactic level, it is discovered that Chinese authors used more passive voice than native writers. In both groups, unmarked thematic structures are prominent while marked thematic structures were also widely used. The author attempted to explain her findings from three points: the influence of Chinese language, different thinking models, and insufficient language competence.Based on the above findings, this paper proposed some practical translation techniques and suggestions in the hope of helping Chinese authors improve their English abstracts. |
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