The Quality of English-Language Abstracts in RTU Bachelor’s Papers: A Qualitative Analysis of Common Mistakes

The paper aims to gain insight into the quality of the English-language versions of the bachelor’s paper abstracts written by RTU students over the period from 2023 to 2024. Each student is required to submit an abstract of their paper in both English and Latvian, and the abstracts should be equivalent. From a research corpus of over 1000 abstracts, 100 abstracts in both Latvian and English were selected to undergo a qualitative analysis of the English language used. The abstracts were analysed in various aspects, such as text creation, grammar, punctuation and usage of tenses. The abstracts’ English versions seem to have been machine-translated or at least created with some assistance from machine translation tools. Unlike expected, most abstracts seem to have reasonably suitable grammar and punctuation, as that could be the positive aspect of machine translation. However, as machine translation automatically copies the style and wording used in the Latvian original, like unscientific way of writing, excessive word repetition, and the use of future tenses in the abstract to describe the paper. Even though the quality of most English abstracts is passable, students would benefit from guidance on how to edit their machine-translated abstracts to improve their quality. It would be an easy addition to writing guidelines, and giving more writing and translation guidance to students would improve their writing process.