Mediating cross-cultural differences in research article rhetorical moves in academic translation: A pilot corpus-based study of abstracts

Research on mediating cross-cultural differences in rhetorical conventions of research article abstracts (RAAs) between such culturally distant languages as English and Chinese is rare. This article aims to explore the differences in rhetorical preferences between independently produced English and Chinese research article abstracts and the strategies used in translating Chinese RAAs into English. RAAs published in three journals between 2006 and 2016 were selected to form three corpora: corpus A consisting of 32 English RAAs, corpus B made up of 38 Chinese RAAs, and corpus C including 38 English RAAs which are translations of the RAAs in corpus B. Corpus A and B form a comparable corpus while corpus B and C constitute a parallel corpus. Results suggest that Chinese and English RAAs have different preferences in rhetorical move patterns because the rhetorical moves of Product and Method are much more frequent in English RAAs compared with their Chinese counterparts, and that rhetorical foreignization is the dominant strategy in translating Chinese RAAs into English. Possible reasons of such rhetorical differences and the impact of this resistant strategy on the reception of the translated RAAs in the international community is discussed. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.