A Comparative Study on Voice Distribution in English Abstracts between Chinese and English Power Papers

Abstract

As many international scholars and editors currently advocated to use more active voice and less passive voice, this new trend aroused many Chinese reaearchers to conduct a comparative study on voice distribution in English abstracts between Chinese and foreign countries. To explore the voice distribution in English abstracts in Chinese and foreign power papers, we randomly sampled 200 English abstracts respectively from international and domestic power papers and analyzed the voice distribution in the abstracts. The results show that Chinese writers and translators tend to use more passive voice than foreign writers, especially in English-speaking countries, while the latter more frequently use active voice in their writings. To futher this study, the following gives a detailed explaination of the reasons of the results. summary, to better exchange mutual latest achievements in power industry, it is crucial to keep pace with international new trend, obey international common practice, particularly the rules in English abstracts writing. Index Terms - power papers, English abstract, voice distribution, active voice, passive voice 1. Introduction Abstract is an indispensable part of a paper, which even can decide the paper whether can be included. In the process of including scientific papers by international retrieval systems, the English abatract is regarded as a key to success. For instance, EI Compendex including papers is decided by English abstract and keywords(1). This shows how important the abstract is. Meanwhile, as a key industry in China, the development and research of power have to keep track of international new trend, and its English abstract is a crucial hub for communication between domestic and abroad. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the English abstract of power papers. Divided into active and passive voice, the proper use of voice is one of the key factors in the writing of papers. The famaous linguist Quark pointed out that the frequency of using passive voice in English science and technology is ten times higher than that of active voice(2). The passive voice is regarded as one of the characteristics of scientific papers. However, with the constant changes of language, the era of passive voice dominatied in English has changed. International researchers start to advocate widely use active voice in scientific and technological papers.