| The previous research of English abstract writing and translating was mainly conducted in lexical,syntactical and discourse level of various professional fields,which were usually concerned with translation strategies and rules.However,the systematic investigation into the communication journal articles’ abstracts has been seldom touched,especially studies on the linguistic features on the basis of the corpus.In this thesis,four research questions are discussed:(1)Are there any similarities and differences in the sentence structures between the translated abstracts and original English ones?(2)What are the characteristics of English sentences with inanimate and animate subjects,and the composition characteristics of subjects in the translated abstracts and original English abstracts?(3)Is there any commonness or difference in the category,frequency and position of adverbial between the two corpora?(4)What are the similarities and differences of self-sourced reporting verbs in the quantity and frequency,high-frequency vocabulary,reporting format and the frequency of different classifications between the two corpora?In order to conduct an empirical study on the above questions,this thesis adopts the contrastive analysis and corpus-based approach and builds a comparable corpus: 1)translated abstracts from Communication research articles written by Chinese authors;2)Original English abstracts in the same field written by native English writers.Taking the translated abstracts as the observe corpus and the original English abstracts as the reference corpus,the author manually labels and tags the selected data and makes a statisticalanalysis on the data at the lexical and syntactical levels with the help of AntConc3.2.1.At the lexical level,this current study mainly focuses on the self-sourced reporting verb consisting of quantity and frequency,high-frequency,format and classification while the thesis emphasizes the sentence type,the subject and adverbial at the syntactic level.Based on the above analysis of frequencies,the author also uses the loglikelihood ratio calculator1.0 to testify the significance of differences between the two types of abstracts so as to further verify the differences in the four aspects.The quantitative analyses can predict and explain the possibility of negative transfer of the linguistic differences and the occurrence of positive transfer of some linguistic similarities.This study also explores the reasons caused by different cultures and modes of thinking behind the data.In addition,some practical writing norms and translation strategies with C-E translation examples are presented at the end of each chapter for the aim of improving the quality of translated abstracts and increasing the ratio of being indexed into international databases.Major finding are: 1)The simple and complex sentence occupy a larger proportion both in TEAC and OEAC,but there are fewer compound and compound-complex sentences in two corpora.Compared with the Chinese authors,native English writers tend to use more complex sentences while Chinese are more likely to employ simple ones.Besides,the simple,complex and compound sentences are significantly different between these two types of abstracts;2)A larger number of inanimate subjects are used not only in TEAC but also in OEAC.But the frequency of personal subjects in the translated abstracts is higher than that in original English ones with a significant difference.As for the nominal nouns as the subjects,the attribute,article and plural used by Chinese authors are more frequently used by native writers,and the plural form presents a statistic difference as the LL value has shown.In the contrast of subject length,there are 16 different word numbers in TEAC while there are only 12 in OEAC,and the word number 6 has a significant difference.There exist five different categories of the constitutions of subjects in the two corpora.As the LL values show,the “Noun”,“Noun+prep phrase”,“The+noun+prep phrase”,“The+adj+noun+prep phrase” and “Adjective+noun+prep phrase” are significantly different between the two types of abstracts;3)The total frequency ofadverbials in original English abstracts is much higher than that in the translated abstracts,but the categories in the former is less than that in the latter.In the two types of abstracts,the adverbial of place takes the highest frequency and the top 6 adverbial are the same.Adverbials of phrases account for the main part but adverbial of clauses are less frequent in the two corpora.The LL value of the adverbial clause of concession indicates a significant difference.A great number of adverbials show up in the simple and complex sentence,and the compound sentence is significantly different between the translated abstracts and original English ones.The results show that both Chinese writers and native English authors prefer to use adverbials at the sentence-final and sentence-initial rather than the sentence-medial.Among the contrasts of three positions,the frequency of medial and final positions in OEAC are higher than that in TEAC,and the frequency of initial positions is higher than that in OEAC.Besides the initial position,there exists no significant difference between the two corpora;4)the quantity and frequency of self-source reporting verbs in the original English are higher than those in the translated abstracts.Four self-sourced reporting verbs present significant difference.The high-frequency self-sourced reporting verbs occur with more word cases in TEAC.Both of them use the third reporting format to demonstrate their own studies and attitudes.In categories of denotation verbs,the results show that native English authors tend to use more research acts for procedures but Chinese writers put more emphasis on the verbs for findings,and the LL value verifies a significant difference in the use of verbs for procedures. |
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