研究論文摘要中譯英之探討

Most academics in Taiwan typically submit their research papers to local journals written in Chinese with abstracts in both Chinese and English. To these scholars, the abstract is the only piece of published writing done in English and is usually translated from its Chinese version. Certain issues such as the quality of the translated abstracts as well as the relationship between the Chinese source text and the English target text have not been given the research attention they deserve. Although an abstract is relatively short as compared with the research article, it shares many features of the research article and should be considered an independent discourse (Lorés, 2004). However, there is a surprising lack of study on the translation of research paper abstracts. The purpose of this proposed study therefore is to explore the relationship between Chinese academic abstracts and their English translations. The research method was the construction of two corpora to examine (1) translation universals happening in translated abstracts and (2) move structures and linguistic features used between translated and non-translated abstracts. A two-phase study were designed as follows: (1) a bilingual parallel corpus was compiled to contain research paper abstracts from various disciplines that are written in Chinese and translated into English by Taiwanese scholars in order to identify the distribution, frequency and patterns of translation universals such as explicitation, simplification, normalization ; (2) a comparable corpus was created with research paper abstracts that are written in English by Taiwanese and English scholars for the identification of different move structures and the occurrence of linguistic features. It is hoped that the findings from this project would have practical uses for local scholars to translate their research paper abstracts and pedagogical implications for teaching academic translation in the classroom.