A Contrastive Analysis For Abstracts Of Research Articles In Chinese And English Journals

English abstract writing in research articles is important because Chinese graduates and researchers have to make their research work known to the world briefly and effectively. Readers can evaluate and decide further reading firstly through it. Therefore it is significant to find out what is the general state in English abstract writing, or rather, translation from Chinese origins in Chinese research papers, especially the problems. The research was conducted by contrastive analysis of two aspects. One aspect is the comparison between English abstracts translated from Chinese abstracts and English abstracts written by English and American authors. The other aspect is the comparison between translated abstracts and the original Chinese abstracts. Totally 120 abstracts in research articles, including 40 Chinese abstracts, 40 translated abstracts, and 40 English abstracts written by English and American authors, were compared to study their genre, including moves and other relative linguistic features. The results show that the frequency of each move in translated abstracts and Chinese abstracts has no significant difference, whereas the frequency of each move in translated abstracts and English abstracts written by English and American authors has significant difference; there are also many differences of the linguistic features between the two groups of abstracts, such as tenses, modal verbs, passive voices, first person pronouns and length of moves between translated abstracts and English abstracts, sci-tech terms, numeric figures and units, sentence structure between translated abstracts and Chinese abstracts. The differences are mainly caused by some linguistic and psychology reasons, such as negative transfer. It is hoped that a genre study like this will help Chinese graduates and researchers in reading and writing English abstracts.