A Comparison between Chinese and Foreign Scientific and Technical Periodicals——Voice Distribution and Front-Weight Sentence's Use Frequency
HE Rui-qing · Shanghai Journal of Translators For Science and Technology · 2004
The statistics of voice distribution and front-weight sentence's use frequency from English abstracts in Chinese and foreign scientific and technical periodicals indicate that Chinese authors use passive voice and front-weight sentence more frequently than foreign authors, particularly those from English-speaking countries. This is because quite many domestic authors equate scientific and technical documents in English with English abstracts in scientific and technical periodicals, unaware of the latter's uniqueness in structure; blindly believe that the effectiveness of passive voice is universal; mistake domestic standard for international standard; do not stick to the standard abstract structure. The information structure theory and the statistics prove that front-weight sentence is undesirable.