A Corpus-based Comparison Of English Abstracts Between Chinese And American Agricultural Journals

English abstracts play a vital role in international academic exchange.A well-written abstract not only helps speed up the reviewing process by editors of international journals,but also allows readers to quickly identify the main points of a paper and thereby stimulate their interest for further research.Therefore,the requirements and standards for translating English abstracts are expected to become more demanding each year as scholars pay more attention to abstract writing or translation.From 2002 up to now,abstract translation has been widely discussed both in China and abroad.However,all those papers published in foreign journals are confined to translating abstracts between Western languages,such as French-English,Spanish-English or,Portuguese-English,and no Chinese-English translation has ever been dealt with.In China,among those 182 papers on abstract translation ever published,only four of them focus on agricultural science,either from the perspective of features,skills,methods,strategies,or syntactic pattern and explication.So far,there has been no comparative study in this particular field based on a corpus of English s from both Chinese and American agricultural science journals.In light of the corpus design principles and approaches put forward by Biber,Macaro,and Wang Kefei,as well as the impact factor ranking of the available SCI journals in different countries and languages,308 English abstracts published from January 2017 to October 2018 are selected from 4 international journals and grouped into two corpora:AAJ(Abstracts of American SCI Agricultural Journals)and ACJ(Abstracts of Chinese SCI Agricultural Journals).The two American SCI journals are Molecular Systems Biology and Annual Review of Ecology,Evolution,and Systematics,the 2 Chinese counterparts are The Crop Journal and Rice Science.In addition,Journal of Hebei Agricultural University,a core journal,is also used as comparative corpus of AHJ(Abstracts of Hebei Agricultural University Journal),with a collection of 134 English abstracts from January 2019 to January 2020.Taken together,there are three corpora package provides a total collection of 442 English abstracts with 85,727 English words.Following the International Standard ISO214-1976,National Standard GB7713-87 and GB6447-86,the 19 assessment points set forth in the Evaluation Criteria proposed by Narine et al.,this study uses AntConc 3.5.8 software as a tool to score and analyze these 442 abstracts in terms of length,lexical diversity,use of prepositions,the definite article the,the conjunction "and",and the pronouns "we" and"it" The results show that 95%of the 132 abstracts in AAJ cover purpose,research design,background,subject,and conclusion while the majority of them do not concern specific numerical data,research limitations,or data sources.Of the 176 abstracts in ACJ,95%cover purpose,background,and subject,but most do not involve recommendation for future study,research limitations or data sources.Among the 134 s in AHJ,while 91.04%concern research results or findings,57.89%of the assessment points are left unheeded or neglected.The data show that the number of abstracts less than 200 words in AAJ is significantly lower than ACJ and AHJ.The top three prepositions "of","in",and "to"are the same in order in these three corpora,but the proportion of these four prepositions "to","by","with" and "from" varies considerably.The use frequency of the definite article "the" is almost the same in these four SCI journals,but it tends to be overused in AHJ.Although there exists little difference as to the use frequency of the conjunction "and" and the pronoun "it" between these journal abstracts,the underuse of the pronoun "we" is significant in AHJ,as our traditional academic writing textbooks suggest that the first person "we" be not used.Based on a specialized,self-built corpus,this study aims to propose a Chinese-English abstract translation evaluation model as well an English abstract template,and provide original raw data for further research.Furthermore,it is hoped that the research findings may offer guidance to Chinese agricultural experts and scholars to write more effective English abstracts,and thereby helping them to serve the society with better language and promote international exchange.