A Contrastive Study of English Introductions of Chinese and British Museums in Move Distribution and Readability

Abstract

Based on a designed move analysis model, we manually annotated 83 English introductions of Chinese museums (EICMs) and 127 English introductions of British museums (EIBMs), and used SPSS to do the significance test on the distribution of moves. The result shows that the moves of Identification, Location, History, Evaluation, Additional Museum Attractions, and Summary in EICMs occur significantly more frequently, while the moves of Highlight, Action Soliciting, and Support occur significantly less frequently. Besides, the study also investigated the readability of the introductions of the two groups of museums. The result shows that EICMs’ overall readability is significantly lower, especially in Narrativity, Syntactic Simplicity, and Deep Cohesion.

Those results show that EICMs are more of informational text, while EIBMs are more of promotional text. Choices of narrative person, substance and function words, and use of causal and intentional particles may lead to the difference in readability. Contemporary museums have long since moved on from the stage where objects were left to “speak for themselves”. Museum introductions’ content selection and language expression should be targeted at their readers. The findings are expected to provide a reference for the writing and translation of museum introductions, and attract more visitors to Chinese museums.