英文摘要 |
This study examined the feasibility of supplying extended English-language abstracts for Taiwan’s scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences (H&SS). First, it sought to determine the potential difficulty of doing the necessary abstracting and translation work. Second, it sought to determine the feasibility of improving the quality of extended English abstracts by beginning to do so and then evaluating the relative degree of difficulty of this task. Third, it sought to identify problems that may arise in the course of engaging in such a project and to propose ways of facilitating future large-scale implementation of the project. Fifteen H&SS scholarly books that had been sponsored by the National Academy for Educational Research were chosen for the pilot study. Each featured a unique topic that concerned Taiwan, and the selection included both standard books and compilations of independent essays. Informed by action research, this study adopted a reflexive analysis approach to analyze the data, which were collected via in-depth interviews with the abstractors and translators as well as review logs. The study identified the problems encountered in the production of Chinese abstracts as well as in their extended English translations. The findings showed that professional abstracting skills will significantly improve the end-products. Translation problems that might arise in producing English abstracts for scholarly texts and strategies for facilitating the future implementation of this project were also discussed. |