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Abstract
Self-translators devote themselves to translating their writings into another language. Since they are engaged in their works, they are usually believed to have more freedom in their translational choices. However, the limits of their freedom still depend on the translation skopos. That is, the particular aim and the potential audience of the translation should be considered so that the appropriate translation strategies can be chosen. Although studies on self-translation have conventionally centered on some canonical self-translators and their literary works, scholars from non-literary domains have recently shown interest in this phenomenon, for example, by handling it in the academic context. When it comes to disseminating scientific texts, abstracts become prominent in transferring academic information to an international audience. Therefore, translation of these texts requires particular attention to ensure a good academic impact and strong intercultural communication. This paper is an attempt to examine the self-translations of academic abstracts and make a comparative analysis of linguistic structures. The corpus includes Turkish and English abstracts taken from scholarly articles written in social sciences. Based on different methodological perspectives regarding self-translation in the academic context, the abstracts were examined according to the linguistic categorization consisting of intersentential relations, tense usage, cohesive devices, and lexical choices. As a result, it was uncovered that the self-translators largely preserved the original texts on the semantic level and that they opted for structural changes due to linguistic differences in languages.
