earticle

영어

This paper aims to identify the norms and genre conventions governing English research article abstracts and to determine whether professional translators' English translations of Korean abstracts conform to the norms of the English academic discourse community. The paper first provides an overview of Halliday's systemic functional grammar with the focus on the field of discourse, followed by a discussion of features of scientific English. It then pairs authentic Korean abstracts, their English translations, and original English abstracts of similar topics and analyzes them within the framework of systemic functional grammar, paying attention to the way they construe experiential and logical meanings on a lexico-grammatical level. The key issue is whether the English translations show any consistent patterns in terms of transitivity and taxis and whether they align with the English or Korean norms. The analysis reveals that they all share certain lexico-grammatical features typical of the genre such as agentless passives and nominalizations, while diverging in the distribution of process types and clause dependency. It also shows that the Korean abstracts use more varied, yet static, process types which tend to shift to more dynamic process types in the translations, more in line with the original English abstracts. Based on the findings, the paper concludes that English translations of Korean abstracts tend to reflect the norms and conventions of the English academic discourse rather than those of its Korean counterpart.