关键词: 博物馆简介文本；文本可读性；CohMetrix；语料库

Abstract: Museums are a microcosm of a countrys history and culture, and museum websites are of vital significance to disseminate regional and national cultures to the outside world. Based on a selfconstructed corpus of English translations of 36 museum website texts in China and a reference corpus of 36 museum website texts in English from the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, where English is the native language, this study aims to explore the readability of Chinese and English museum introduction texts with the help of CohMetrix 3.0 and R from three dimensions: descriptive variables, readability principal component analysis and readability, and compare the similarities and differences between the translated Chinese museum texts and the original museum texts from three Englishspeaking countries. The study finds: 1）both corpora tend to use specific vocabularies and mediumlength sentences; 2）both corpora exhibit formal stylistic features; and 3）both corpora have a certain degree of difficulty. Statistical significance tests and analyses of the measures reveal: 1）Chinese museum texts are less evenly distributed in terms of sentence length than the original language; and 2）museums in Englishspeaking countries place more emphasis on reader engagement and interaction with their readers than do Chinese museums. The reasons for these differences can be summarised as follows: translation strategies, layout and thinking pattern. On this basis, this study proposes three suggestions for improving the quality of translation and writing of Chinese museum introduction texts.

Key words: museum introduction texts; text readability; CohMetrix; corpus