On Abstract Translation In Academic Papers From The Perspecitve Of Functionalist Translation Theory

As an important part of academic papers, abstract plays a significant role in academiccommunication and cooperation among the international field. It can not only accurately convey themain information of the thesis, help the readers quickly get to know the main content of the article,assist reviewers to examine and approve the submitted thesis, but also make the documentation retrievalmuch easier. As the academic exchange among different countries becomes more and more frequent inrecent years, most journals in China require the academic papers which are written in Chinese languageshould be furnished with English abstracts so that the English readers can understand the academicdevelopment of our country. However, since the English proficiency of Chinese researchers variesgreatly, English abstracts of academic papers as a whole in our country remains to be improved.This paper adopts the literature method to review studies on abstract translation at home andabroad and find out the problems and deficiencies existed in the previous studies, and then concludesthe guiding role of functionalist translation theory in abstract translation from the perspective of Germanfunctionalist translation theory, especially Reiss’ text typology and Vermeer’s skopos theory. In addition,this paper also adopts contrastive study, case study and qualitative study. Combining with someabstracts of academic theses selected randomly from CNKI, this paper analyzes the translation strategiesof abstracts.Through comparing the similarities and differences between Chinese and English abstract andcombining with the concrete instances, we strive to explore certain strategies and principles suitable forabstract translation of academic papers. According to text typology, abstracts in academic papers belongto informative text, whose function is to accurately convey the thesis’ information. Skopos theoryconsiders that a successful translation must have realized its intended purpose and conformed to theexpression habit of target language. Therefore, translators should take the Chinese abstract asinformation source and then proceed a translation in the light of the features of English abstract.After analysis and discussion, this paper concludes the principles, namely objectivity,comprehensibility and accuracy, that abstract translation should abide by based on the three rules ofskopos theory. Meanwhile, it also proves that the German functionalist translation theory does providetheoretical guidance for the Chinese-English translation of abstracts in academic papers.