C-e Translation Of Academic Abstracts From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

An abstract is the summary of a paper. Recently, with the internationalization of the academic communication, English abstracts become more and more important. Due to the weakness in the interlinguistic translation, the author of the source text often makes the spelling and grammar mistakes. On the other hand, because of the unfamiliarity with the content, the translator will be confused with the terminology and culture. Hence, the translation of the academic abstracts needs the guidance of a theory.Vermeer points out that every action(include translation) is purposeful. The purposes of some papers are clear, such as the civil engineering abstract translation whose purpose is to make the international academic communication and get the scholars’ recognizance. On the contrary, some translational purposes are unclear. However, they at least accomplish the communicative activity suffocated by the culture and language. Subsequently, this paper studies the subsystems of the skopos theory: skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. The purpose includes three aspects, namely, the purpose of the translator, the communicative purpose and some specific purposes. The coherence rule requires the translation to be intra-textual coherence, in another word, the receivers can comprehend the translated abstract easily. The fidelity rule refers to the translation should be inter-textual.This paper concludes the principles of abstract translation, namely, standardization,comprehensibility and accuracy. The standardization comes from the skopos rule. The civil engineering abstract has its characters. Hence, the translation is supposed to obey the standard.The skopos rule points out the translated abstract should comply with specific purpose and conform with standards of the native English abstracts in form and content; comprehensibility is in accordance with the coherence rule. The translation ought to be coherent with the receivers’ situation. As a result, the translated abstract is easy to be comprehended and accepted. Accuracy is based on fidelity rule and skopos rule. The fidelity rule requires the translation be loyal to the original text. The purpose of abstract translation is to transfer information. So the accurate information is the key. Nonetheless, the original text is sometimes blur and unclear. At this time, the translator should obey the skops rule, that is to say, the translator is supposed to break the equivalence, respect the original text, chooseproper strategies and make the information accurate.Although the civil engineering abstract seems complicated, the language feature is the crux. The author of the paper employs 35 civil engineering abstracts from core journals and generalizes the translation strategies during the process in the light of the three principles.(1)This paper deals with the translation of the proper nouns and polysemies and pays attention to the choice of the word.(2) The author of this paper also comes up with the word order of the adverbial, the word order of the attributive, the conversion of the verbs and the preference of the voice and tense in the four parts(introduction, methods, results and conclusion).(3)During the translation of the discourse, the author points out that the differences of the cohesion between English and Chinese, thus, brings up the enlightenment of skopos theory to the translation.In a word, under the guidance of the skopos theory, this paper formulates the translation principles, explores the translation strategies. The author of this paper hopes it can play a guiding role in the translation of abstracts.