Investigating English Translation Of Chinese Research Article Abstracts:A Tripartite Perspective Of Person,Voice And Tense

Abstract constitutes an essential part in academic research articles that has been receiving close attention from scholars at home and abroad.With the ongoing process of academic globalization,the English translation of Chinese research article abstracts directly bears on the dissemination of research findings in the international academia.Besides,its quality also decides whether the research findings can be recognized by international fellow academics.Therefore,it is quite necessary to study the English translation of Chinese research article abstracts.The past several decades has seen ample studies on abstracts from different perspectives by worldwide scholars,whose findings have played a positive role in promoting the standardization of English translation of Chinese research article abstracts.Different from that,with the help of self-established corpora,this study seeks to first investigate the similarities and differences in the use of person,voice and tense between the English translation of Chinese research article abstracts and the original English abstracts of international academic journals;then several possible reasons for differences of English abstracts between them are explored;finally,taking English abstracts of international academic journals at the same period as writing references,the author contributes to some suggestions for the English translation of Chinese research article abstracts.The study is guided by the following questions:1.What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and international academic journals with regard to person in English abstracts?2.What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and international academic journals with regard to voice in English abstracts?3.What are the similarities and differences between Chinese and international academic journals with regard to tense in English abstracts?4.What are the possible reasons for the differences of English abstracts between Chinese and international academic journals?Based on above questions,this study selects eight linguistic journals that are generally recognized at home and abroad,and 288 English abstracts published from 2015 to 2020 are collected to establish two corpora:CACJ(Corpus of English Abstracts in Chinese Academic Journals)and CAIJ(Corpus of English Abstracts in International Academic Journals).With the help of corpus software Tree-Tagger and Ant Conc,we bring to light the similarities and differences between Chinese and international academic journals in the use of person,voice,and tense.Meanwhile,since the tense presents obvious features in different moves of abstracts,the study also probes into the distribution of tenses in different moves based on the five-move model proposed by Hyland.Finally,this study explored the possible reasons from the perspectives of Source Language Shining Through effect,conventions for academic writing and restrictions of culture and tradition.We also put forward three suggestions for the English translation of Chinese research article abstracts:raise the frequency of first person,reduce the fixed lexical pattern and increase the use of verbal phrase.The study brings to light the following conclusions:1.Chinese academic journals seldom use the first person but the third person "it"is frequently adopted.By contrast,international academic journals use more first person“we" and "I" to represent the authorial presence.2.The frequency of passive voice is higher than the active voice in two corpora,but Chinese academic journals use them approximately in equal frequency,while the other use the passive voice twice as often as the active voice.3.They exhibit basically the same principles in terms of tenses.Specifically,the simple present tense demonstrates the highest frequency,followed by the simple past tense and the present perfect tense.At the same time,the present perfect tense is mainly used in "background" move and never appears in "method" move,and the simple present tense is the predominant tense in "result" and "discussion" moves.This study expands the contrastive analysis on the use of the person,voice and tense in research article English abstracts at home and abroad.The results and suggestions are of certain implications for the English translation of Chinese research article abstracts and abstracts writing teaching.Further,the research methods are expected to provide some inspirations for students majoring in Linguistics.