Abstracts of English and Vietnamese business papers (MS THAO NGUYEN)
It is undeniable that among numerous languages of the world, English occupies the first position in international communication nowadays. It is English that is also used the most widely in political scientific, technical, economic, trade activities. In Vietnam, the role of this universal language becomes very important, especially, in the present period when Viet Nam is moving its economic reform strongly towards a market economy, deeper integration into the global economy and official accession to WTO. Therefore, for economists as well as economics students, the pressure to master this language is much greater. It is an important part in their work to involve reading and writing economics books or journals in English. However, it is not easy at all to get an access to English for economics. This gives an increasing interest to linguists in English for Economics. There have been many investigations into the nature of economics writing such as economics correspondence, technical manuals, journals, institutional bulletins, textbooks etc. These are different genres of academic writing. Mastering these genres is necessary because each genre presents a different set of rhetorical choices – from lexicon and grammar to format, content, and organization – that students can study and adapt to their own writing. Among these genres, writing abstracts of economics papers is extremely important for economics specialists and students. The first reason is that for graduate economics students who soon begin or have already been engaged in their own research, they need to create an abstract of a course paper, article, or dissertation, or they might intend to submit an abstract to a conference. However, they may not be aware that this kind of genre exists. Moreover, abstract conventions may differ from discipline to discipline. For example, abstracts of economics papers are different from abstracts of physics papers. In other words, economics abstracts have their own patterns economics students should master. Second, for Vietnamese economics specialists who want their research papers to be published in foreign journals, it requires them to furnish the journals with abstracts in English. Unfortunately, writing abstracts of economics papers in English is different from writing ones in Vietnamese because the degree to which the conventions of genre may be transferable cross-culturally varies from genre to genre. Therefore, even economics specialists whose economics abstracts are considered excellent in Vietnamese have problems with writing English abstracts. To get the admission from editors and reviewers, some of them have to resort to help from translators and feel anxious about both the linguistic and substantive accuracy of these translations. Third, abstracts are a description or factual summary of a longer writing, used to provide readers with an exact and concise knowledge of the full article. Therefore, it is the part most scholars read first before deciding whether to read the article itself. Definitely, business articles accompanied by poor quality abstracts will be hindered from conveying information.
From these reasons, we can see that creating business abstracts in good English is important. There have been many efforts to improve this situation such as offering business English courses in which this kind of genre is presented. Regrettably, these courses have been considered as remedial and separate from mainstream college classes