Proofreading Challenges in the English Translation of Academic Abstracts and Articles

Abstract

The world of contemporary science demands from every respected researcher to publish their findings in international databases, whose metrics have become a measure for the popularity and influence of scholarly journals. Hardly is it possible to build a successful academic career without publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. As part of the requirements, authors are supposed to provide abstracts of their materials in English or even translate their articles in languages that are not their native. Such a situation poses a challenge to both authors and technical editors of Bulgarian academic journals as they are expected to proofread highly specific translated texts in a language that is not their native. More often than not, those editors have neither the source text to rely on, nor the broader context of the study in cases when the articles have been written in foreign languages and thus they face a number of translation challenges. The present study focuses on some difficulties that regularly occur in the process of proofreading the English translation of academic abstracts and articles, such as ambiguity, translation of titles of literary works, and interference from the native language. The basic aim is to analyze those problems from the perspective of translation studies and eventually suggest some possible ways of coping with them.