Abstract
Since the beginning of the 20th century, the topic of whether “Mandarin is a language that can describe science” has attracted the interests of psychologists, linguists, and science educators. This paper compared the features of Mandarin and English science texts by analyzing the reading difficulties encountered by ‘experts’ in science under the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Mandarin and English versions of the texts on ‘Newton’s First Law of Motion’ of Conceptual Physics were selected as target texts. The text was composed of 362 sentences. Twenty-nine ‘experts’ in physics were asked to read the Mandarin version of the text, and pick out whatever statements troubled them, and note the reasons if possible. On average, each reader produced about 17 (total 490) reading difficulties, which occurred at the level of single word, nominal group, clause and clauses, sentence, and above. The derivatives of ‘force’ in English and ‘力 (li)’(force) in Mandarin were compared to elaborate their semantic differences. ‘What causes the acceleration of an object’ and the discourses of ‘inertia’ were the two topics that troubled most readers; the nature of these difficulties were analyzed and interpreted in the light of ‘technicality construction’. Lastly, ‘Newton weight’ was accepted by all readers as a proper term to describe the phenomenon. The result reflected mistranslation and undifferentiated use of scientific terms in the Mandarin world. However, not all reading difficulties are inevitable; if used carefully and skillfully, Mandarin could be suitable for describing science discourses.
| Keywords: | science text; science Mandarin; reading difficulties; systemic functional linguistics |
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