Examining Abstracts from Self-Translation Perspective: A Corpus-Based Study on the Use of Active/Passive Voice and Tenses

The present study aimed to examine the use of structural elements (active/passive voice and tenses) while translating from the source language to the target language in the self-translation of English and Turkish abstracts in doctoral dissertations. To this end, the doctoral dissertations written by students at the department of Translation and Interpreting were obtained from the collections of dissertations published online by the National Thesis Centre of the Council of Higher Education (CoHE) in Türkiye. A total of 144 abstracts of doctoral dissertations were examined within the scope of the present study. The corpus included 72 English abstracts with their Turkish translations, and 72 Turkish abstracts with their English translations. The abstracts and their translations were aligned sentence by sentence through The Phrase platform. The Phrase platform is a comprehensive translation management system and it also provides an alignment of the parallel texts. Data analysis was performed tagging on the document obtained in Excel format. This study particularly focused on providing a general picture of how active/passive voice and various tenses were self-translated into the target language. The analysis provides a pattern of how different structures including active/passive voice, and tenses, in the English-Turkish language are transformed and translated depending on the direction of translation. The findings reveal consistent shifts in the use of active/passive voice and tense structures across translation directions, highlighting translators’ alignment with the rhetorical conventions and stylistic norms of the target academic culture.