First, whether there are differences in subjects between English and Chinese. In the abstracts of English scientific papers, English sentences have clear subjects, and language form is more important than language content, while Chinese is not. Due to the specific regulations of various academic journals or the need for objectification of abstracts, "aiming at …, researching …, analyzing …" often appears in the abstracts of Chinese scientific papers.
Such a sentence form without a subject. This is also an important feature of English-Chinese abstract writing of scientific papers, that is, stylization. Therefore, in Chinese-English translation, the translator must consider the differences between Chinese and English, and never translate into an English sentence without a subject. Instead, he wants to take the object corresponding to a sentence without a subject as the subject, turn the patient into an agent and translate it into English passive voice.
Second, the differences between English and Chinese tenses. Verb tenses are commonly used in English to indicate the time when an action or behavior occurs or goes on, such as present tense, past tense, future tense, etc. Verb forms will change accordingly with time. Therefore, verbs include simple tense, progressive tense and past tense. On the contrary, Chinese verbs are not a few forms of change, and the sequence and state of actions are reflected by lexical means such as present, present, future, future and frequent.
Generally speaking, because the main object of EST description is objective facts, phenomena or truth, the tense of predicate verbs mainly adopts the simple present tense. The simple past tense is only used when adverbials of past time are used, or when describing facts that happened in the past. If we emphasize the influence of past events on the present, we use the present perfect tense. In translation, because Chinese tense has not changed, we can only add auxiliary words to express English tense according to Chinese expression habits.
Third, the differences between English and Chinese phonetics. As far as voice is concerned, English verbs can be divided into active and passive, while Chinese verbs are mostly active except prepositions "Bei", "Wei" and "gei". In order to highlight the facts discussed, the passive voice is usually used in EST, and the object of discussion and the question or conclusion to be explained are the subjects. And Chinese because of the need of ideographic.
Although the words "text" and "author" are omitted, the subject of the abstract sentence is still logically "text" or "author", so the whole sentence is a long sentence without a subject. In translation, the translator should not only consider the differences between Chinese and English expressions, but also be good at breaking sentences, find out the logical subject corresponding to Chinese sentences without subjects according to the meaning group, and cut Chinese long sentences into short sentences.
Judging from the sentence structure, English is a hypotactic language, and the subject-predicate structure is the main part of the sentence. Taking predicate verbs as the center, infinitives, participles, prepositions, conjunctions, relative pronouns and relative adverbs are widely used. , reflecting the formal relationship, constructing other components of the sentence layer by layer, showing a spatial schema extending outward from the center.
Chinese belongs to paratactic language, that is, through the use of multiple verbs or "running sentences", one thing at a time is clearly explained, showing a time-sequential operation schema. Therefore, when translating abstracts of scientific papers, translators must fully understand the differences between Chinese and English, grasp the relationship between the subject and components of sentences, and express them in authentic English or Chinese, otherwise they will make mistakes carelessly.
4. Cohesion and coherence of English and Chinese sentences. As a text, it is composed of several simple sentences or several complex sentences, and the arrangement of sentences should have certain internal relations in structure and meaning. English emphasizes hypotaxis, and the cohesion and coherence of a text are mainly reflected by complete syntactic forms and various dominant function words.
Chinese, on the other hand, emphasizes "parataxis" and pays attention to simplicity. The cohesion and coherence of texts are achieved through the implicit relationship between narrative logic and artistic conception. Therefore, when translating abstracts, translators need to understand and be familiar with the differences between English and Chinese in the expression of logical relations and grammatical cohesion.
When translating Chinese abstracts into English, in order to make English texts clear and semantically coherent, the translator must pay attention to the use of cohesive devices, that is, coordinate conjunctions and subordinate conjunctions, as well as connective pronouns, connective adverbs, relational pronouns and relational adverbs, which can be used to connect the preceding and following articles, making the articles more cohesive and more in line with the characteristics of English texts.
If the translator lacks this knowledge and can't grasp the relationship between sentences in English translation, the translated abstract will usually be an incoherent and relatively independent sentence, rather than a unified and organically related text.