A genre analysis of Chinese and English abstracts of academic journal articles: A parallel-corpus-based study

Abstract

With the increasing prominence and importance of abstracts in international academic communication, research on abstract genre has become much more necessary. We aimed to make an overall and comprehensive study on journal abstracts at home and abroad from the perspective of genre analysis by building this large-scale Chinese-English Parallel Abstract Corpus (CEPAC) with advanced corpus and computer technology. Findings show that there is still a relatively significant difference in some aspects between Chinese and English abstracts. The present corpus will bridge the genre research of abstracts and its social functions, facilitate researchers' genre analysis, and benefit both Chinese and English abstract writing, translation teaching and dictionary compilation of academic terms. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.