Translation Of Introduction To Academic Paper From The Perspective Of Thematic Progression Patterns

Academic paper writing is very important for researchers and scholars to share their research findings. An introduction, as the first part of academic paper, announces the topic of research background and purposes. A well-written introduction leads readers to understand the whole paper and proved the necessity of the whole research. As the most important and the most difficult part of an academic paper, many scholars have studied from linguistic perspective and some from the translation of introduction. However, few studies combine the linguistic and translation together to study the translation of introduction.In this study, we compared introductions written by Chinese writers and those written by native speakers of English to offer relevant translation techniques. The present study tries to answer the following questions: 1) what are the features of introductions in Chinese and English academic papers? 2) what are the features of Chinese and English introductions, and the translated versions? 3) what translation techniques can be adopted to translate introductions of academic papers?The participants of this study are PhD students of Chongqing University. This study collected introductions written by Chinese writers and the English translated versions provided by PhD students and introductions written by native speakers of English. This study compared and analyzed the structure and thematic features of introductions written by Chinese writers and introductions written by native speakers of English. This study also indicated the influence of structure and thematic features on Chinese-English translation and intended to offer relevant translation techniques.After analyses, this study found that: 1) introductions written by the Chinese and those written by native speakers of English focus on Move 1 and introductions written by the Chinese tend to neglect Move 2; 2) the English introductions are more coherent than the Chinese introductions from the perspective of thematic progression patterns; 3) the English translated version provided by PhD students cannot fulfill its purpose in the target culture. After the analyses of the source texts and the target texts, the study based on thematic progression patterns, suggested relevant translation techniques, including omission of rheme, addition of theme, combination of theme and rheme and reconstruction of thematic progression patterns.