| Abstract, as an indispensable component of a scientific research paper, plays a crucial role in academic communication. Papers published in Chinese are usually required to furnish a corresponding English abstract. However, English abstracts in Chinese scientific research papers, according to survey, in general still have room for improvement.This paper is a study on how to improve the quality of English abstracts in Chinese scientific journals. Taking the functional approaches of translation (especially the skopos theory), the paper aims to formulate feasible and operable principles and techniques for translating Chinese abstracts into English.The paper first of all points out the fact that English abstract in Chinese context is in nature a matter of translation. The methodology in this study is a combination of literature analysis and corpus analysis. It takes typical examples from a parallel corpus around 35,000 words of Chinese and English abstracts. The analysis is carried out according to the universal standard and general features of English abstracts, chiefly from the linguistic and the stylistic aspects.The theoretical foundation is functional translation theories, especially theories of text typology and skopos theory. The former proves that abstracts belong to a specific genre which has its special linguistic and stylistic features. The latter brings the target text into the focus of translation. The paper particularly makes a comparison between the functional translation theory and traditional"equivalence"-based translation theory, claiming that the functional framework is more suitable in guiding abstract translation.It postulates that the translator should not take"equivalence"as the guideline for abstract translation. Instead, they should take the source text as the information origin, and then analyze, rearrange, and express the information in accordance to the norms of target language in the target culture.
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