A Project Report On Translating Into English Abstracts Of Chinese Research Articles In Humanities And Social Sciences

As a typical kind of academic discourse, the abstract is characterized by selected terms, complete sentence structures, informative content, and formal style. Since the academic exchanges between China and foreign countries have greatly increased, the Chinese to English translation of the abstracts of research articles determines to a great extent whether our academic achievements can be effectively disseminated around the globe. Unfortunately, the abstract translation in China is plagued by incompleteness, inaccuracy, and incoherence. Consequently, there is an urgent need to improve our translation quality.It is a great honor for the author to participate in the one-year C-E translation project of abstracts for Journal of Nanjing Normal University (Social Science Edition). The project is of practical significance as it integrates translation studies with other disciplines, such as literature, law, education, and psychology. Based on the project and guided by the Skopos theory, this report discusses major issues and difficulties at lexical, sentential and discourse levels, as well as provides corresponding solutions. Also, it summarizes the differences between Chinese and English abstracts and the rules of translating academic abstracts. It is hoped that the report will be of some help for domestic studies on academic abstracts.