C-E Translation Of Abstracts In Academic Papers-Perspective Of Functionalism

The abstract of an academic paper plays a crucial role in academic communication and more often than not it stands for the whole paper. In an age of fast and wide academic communication, the world is now eager to know more about the development in China's science, technology, medicine, farming & forestry, and almost all fields of life. Hence, the abstracts of academic papers meet their great need. In the meanwhile, domestic researchers are nowadays aware of the importance of joining the world academic dialogues and also the significance of letting the world hear the Chinese voice. Hence, most academic journals in China urge papers published in Chinese to be furnished with Chinese abstracts and their English counterparts. Yet, since the researchers'English proficiency varies greatly, the English abstracts produced for the academic papers are really in a mess now and abstract translation is far from being satisfactory. In addition to the large amount of spelling mistakes and Chinglish expressions, there occurs the terminology mismatching and even the cultural deficiency. This defect of abstract translation makes it hard for academic communication and might even lead to cultural misunderstanding. It is high time that we made efforts to analyze that great mess so as to find some guiding methods for future work based upon translation theories.The main theoretical foundations in the thesis are the text typology and the Skopos theory. The former proves that the abstract is a kind of information text, whose primary function is to convey information to the receivers. The latter suggests that the target texts must be comprehensible and meaningful to receivers in target language culture and the communicative situation in which the target texts are to be used. Therefore, it is suggested that translators should take the Chinese abstracts as the information origin, and then do the translation in accordance with the universal standard and general features of English abstracts, so that target texts are identical to information of the source texts, comprehensible and clear for the readership, and conformable with norms of English abstracts. This study shows that the Functionalism is suitable for guiding abstract translation.