Attitudinal Markers in Translations of Dissertation Abstracts in Social and Natural Sciences

Abstract

In the past, academic texts were encouraged to be as objective and impersonal as possible. However, new researches on stance, metadiscourse, modality, hedging, evaluation and appraisal have shown that academic and scientific writings have a varying degree of subjectivity that helps them relate to the reader, make compelling arguments as well as space for new knowledge. This degree of subjectivity differs among disciplines. The current study, applied the Appraisal theory of Martin and White (2005) to a parallel corpus of original and translated MA and PhD dissertation abstracts in social and natural sciences to find out how writers explicitly project their attitude into the texts and how these explicit attitudinal markers change in the course of translation. To study the changes, an ex post facto categorization of changes to attitude was constructed and qualitative and quantitative analyses of the data were carried out. Results were studied in comparison between languages and disciplines. It was found that social sciences drew on attitudinal markers significantly more than natural sciences. Results also showed that social sciences underwent more changes in attitude than natural sciences. The most frequent types of changes in attitude in different disciplines were recognized and illustrated by instances from the corpus. It was concluded that, in general, regarding attitude, translated abstracts were highly distorted. Finally, pedagogical implications were provided, calling for attention to attitude markers in translation and supervision on translated abstracts.