A Study On Chinese-English Translation Of Abstracts In Sci-tech Papers

English abstract, as an indispensable component of a sci-tech paper, serves as the "bridge" or media in information transmission and academic communication internationally. In view of the fact that international indexing systems like Ei (Engineering Index), SCI (Science Citation Index) and CA (Chemical Abstracts) always attach much attention to English abstracts, a high-quality English abstract is supposed to facilitate the paper to be retrieved or cited and expand its active influence among foreign readership. However, since some researchers are devoid of enough bilingual language skills especially English skills, along with deficient understanding on stylistic features of abstracts, there exist some translation problems which can be summarized at the three levels-lexicon, sentence and discourse. As a result, to change the situation and improve the quality of abstract translation, it is high time that we made further researches on abstract translation by means of certain translation theory.The data of the thesis is collected from sci-tech abstracts in core journals issued in the past two years. For the translation problems or mistakes existing in the abstracts, corresponding countermeasures as well as some enlightenment on abstract translation are put forward. In addition to the dependence upon universal standards of English abstracts, the thesis adopts Newmark’s semantic translation and communicative translation as the theoretical guidance. The applicability of semantic translation and communicative translation to Chinese-English translation of abstracts in sci-tech papers is elaborated. The two translation methods, semantic translation and communicative translation, are proved to be both useful to provide practical guidance through the lexical level, syntactic level and discourse level so as for the target text to be:1) identical to truthful information of source texts;2) in line with stylistic features of English abstract;3) comprehensible and clear for the readership. This study shows that semantic translation and communicative translation can be an effective approach to guide abstract translation.