A Study On The English Translation Of Chinese Petroleum Sci-Tech Paper Abstracts In Journals Of Four Petroleum Universities

The abstract is an important part of academic papers.Up to now,there has been few researches on abstracts of the petroleum sci-tech papers.In this paper,a parallel corpus and a comparable corpus are built for a quantitative study on the translated abstracts of petroleum sci-tech papers at the word,sentence,and text levels,and the most representative features are examined,such as nominalization,personal pronouns and tenses.The results are as follows.In general,there are many elementary grammatical errors.Moreover,compared with English abstracts in foreign journals,the average length of the translated abstracts is shorter,which reveals a tendency of simplification in translation.Specifically,1)the CE corpus has a lower lexical density but higher TTR(type/token ration).The most frequently used words in content words are nouns,which due to the high usage rate of nominalization and low usage rate of pronouns.2)There is an excessive use of the first person and the present continuous tense at the sentence level.3)Chinese authors use more three-move and four-move models,which show a simplification in the moves.Simple and colloquial conjunctions such as “and”,“so” are more frequently adopted at the text level.Despite the disadvantages above,there are also some advantages.The first-person pronouns and the active voice are getting more and more attention from domestic scholars and used in the translation.This study has a certain guiding significance for the English translation of abstracts of petroleum sci-tech papers.In addition,this study has practical guidance and practical value for the construction of the education of MTI and the translation laboratories in our school.