Academic Abstracts in English, Czech and English Translation from Czech – Tracing Convergences
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| Year of publication | 2010 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The paper uses abstracts to academic papers in sociology published in English and Czech during the recent 25 years to trace the conventions of the genre in the two languages and their development over the period of increasing integration of Czech scholarship into the international academic community and coming to terms with the requirements of academic discourse in English as the Lingua Franca. Abstracts of 3 kinds will be used: original abstracts by English native speakers, original abstracts in Czech, and abstracts to Czech papers translated into/written in English. The method used approximates grounded theory: a number of text features will first be coded in order to provide a basis for comparisons expected to reflect the relative distance/closeness of samples of the genre across temporal and linguistic borders, enabling to draw conclusions about the relative stability/fluidity of the individual conventions of the genre in the two languages and in the translational variant of English. Although the findings are bound to be at least partly influenced by the field from which the abstracts are drawn (sociology), they might be indicative of more general tendencies to be explored subsequently and might have implications utilizable in teaching academic writing in English to Czech scholars. |