A Corpus Based Study on Tense Translation in Academic Discourse: French/English Theses Abstracts as a Case Study

Abstract

English verb tenses present significant challenges impacting both writing and translation into English by non-native speakers. This paper examines the translation of tenses from French to English in a corpus of 40 thesis abstracts across disciplines including biology, geology, physics, chemistry, and mathematics and computer sciences, submitted by Moroccan doctoral students with no prior training in translation. Drawing on Day’s (1995), Malcolm’s (1987), and Salager-Meyer’s (1992) functional frameworks, the study classifies each tense mismatch according to the rhetorical function it serves in scientific discourse. The analysis shows that most mismatches follow a recurring pattern in which a French passé composé reporting the students’ own methods, results, or attribution to prior research is rendered in the English present tense, blurring the distinction between the students’ specific findings and established disciplinary knowledge. These patterns point to gaps in genre awareness, rather than to general English proficiency alone. The findings of this analysis have the potential to significantly inform curriculum designers in the development of specialized language courses tailored to enhance the genre awareness, academic writing, and translation skills of multilingual doctoral students .