Abstract of an article in engineering sciences and its machine translation

Abstracts in Russian and English are written according to certain rules. For articles written in Russian, an abstract in English is the only means of informing the global scientific community about the authors’ research results. However, the quality of abstracts in Russian and their translation into English does not always meet the readability criteria and comply with the grammatical, lexical and stylistic rules of the English language. To translate abstracts into English, authors often use machine translation (MT) systems, but they do not always take into account the requirements to the source text quality and limitations inherent in these systems. The author of the article analyzed the structure of abstracts to empirical articles published in the journal “Resources and Technologies” and identified the main structural violations, grammatical, lexical and terminological errors. The author comes to the conclusion that the effective use of MT systems for translating abstracts into English is possible if researchers’ command of the Russian and English languages is at the level sufficient for a concise and unambiguous expression of their thoughts and ideas in accordance with the scientific discourse. The process of the abstract machine translation should include three stages: pre-editing of the original Russian-language text, the translation itself and post-editing of the target text in English. To check the quality of the target text authors can use the tools available on the Internet.