A Discourse-Analysis Approach To Translating Academic Abstracts In Journals

With the increasing frequency of academic exchange, the abstract has become an effective tool in the academic community. As one special type of documents, academic abstracts translation is closely connected with Science and Technology translation. It has been drawing the increasing attention of scholars in different fields, including language workers. The studies on it have been productive to a greater or lesser degree. However, most of these studies are only focused on practical translating problems for individual words and sentences; the comprehensive and systematic study is hardly found. There is apparently lack of a theoretical and practical tool available for translators in this field. Against this background, this thesis makes a analysis of contextual factors and discourse textures of academic abstracts from the dynamic perspective of the discourse level and investigates the interaction of the context and the text in this discourse and the potential problems in the process of translating, with the aim of applying discourse analysis theories to academic abstracts translation and draw the principles and rules for the production of the target text. The descriptive study showed the Chinese-English translation of academic abstracts is highly subject-specific, receptor-oriented and genre-specific. Therefore, we put forth the following three translation principles for academic abstracts discourse: 1. faithfulness to the content and cohesiveness to the style; 2. equivalence to the source language and appropriateness for the target language; 3. conventionality and standardization. The present studies can be applied to second language teaching and learning, translating practice and further theory research in this field.