Abstract: Within the theoretical framework of functional linguistics, a corpus-based approach has been employed to generate the wordlists concerning ideational, interpersonal and textual metafunctions of academic articles on medical science. These wordlists reflect the linguistic features and distribution laws of three metafunctions, and describes the conventions in the process of translating academic articles on medical science: the choice of material, relational, mental and verbal processes to show the transitivity system; the wide range of subject selection to express various degrees of identity-construction consciousness; the use of modal verbs with low and median value; the causal-conditional connectors to form the logic relations in the target text. It has been proven that academic English translation conform to the common practice of academic discourse community in terms of language choice. The probability and typicality of language use given by the corpus-based approach is insightful to the study of academic English translation.

Key words: corpus-based; translation study, functional linguistics, English for Academic Purposes