Topic 4. Grammatical, lexical and stylistic problems of scientific-technical translation

4.1. The Subject Matter

Translator is supposed to know languages plus the topic discussed, i.e. the subject matter. Translator of fiction should know author’s outlook, his aesthetic view and tastes, literary trends, creative methods, epochs, circumstances, social life, material, spiritual culture, etc.

When translating social and political materials, it is necessary to know politics, political atmosphere and other factors, characteristic to the country, where the material to be translated is created, the epoch, it was written.

Translator of scientific and technical texts should have certain knowledge about this subject: biology, physics, astronomy and engineering.

Once again we would love to underline, that sometimes neither vocabulary, nor grammatical constructions will help us to understand the text, but our background knowledge alone. Only one example: in a scientific text the translator came across the following expression:

... investigation of microdocument storage system using fractional wavelength optical reading methods.

This sentence has three translations:

1. Дослідження системи зберігання мікродокументів, в якому використовуються оптичні методи зчитування фракційної довжини хвиль.

2. Дослідження системи зберігання мікродокументів, яка використовує оптичні методи зчитування фракційної довжини хвиль.

3. Дослідження системи зберігання мікродокументів, в яких використовуються оптичні методи зчитування фракційної довжини хвиль.

This expression is a bright example of the so called syntactical or structural ambiguity. The adverbial participle using can either be attributed here to the word investigation, or the word system. Only in case we know well the subject we’ll translate correctly, because none of the formal grammatical indicators are helpful here. The expert can figure out, which of two possible interpretations is admissible. The translation given below removes the necessity to choose between two options, but the uncertainty remains and may emerge again in some other texts:

Дослідження системи зберігання мікродокументів з використанням оптичних методів зчитування фракційної довжини хвилі.

The following model is also ambiguous:

...the man in armchair reading a newspaper...

We know, that reading refers to the man, and not to armchair and not due to some grammatical indicators, but because we know that only a human being can read.

4.2. Grammatical difficulties of scientific-technical translation

Language of scientific-technical literature differs from colloquial language or that of fiction by certain lexical, grammatical and stylistic peculiarities. Lexical differences are noticed even by non-specialists (considerable number of special terms). Grammatical differences are less significant, still are not less diverse. A great number of extended complex (first of all – subordinate) sentences, used for rendering logical relations among objects, actions, events and facts, which is typical for scientific presentation is one of the greatest grammatical peculiarities of scientific-technical texts.

Among scientific-technical texts, written in different languages, there are considerable grammatical differences, caused by particularities of language grammatical construction, norms and traditions of written scientific language. Thus, in English professional texts the forms of Passive Voice and impersonal forms of verbs, participial constructions and specific syntactical constructions, personal pronouns of the first person singular and monomial (одночленний) Infinitival and Nominative sentences, etc., are more frequently used than in Ukrainian ones.

Grammatical differences between English and Ukrainian texts are mostly caused by inventory disparity. For example, Definite and Indefinite articles, existing in English and specifying distribution of information in English sentence, are absent in Ukrainian. There is no Gerund, verb tenses like Continious and Perfect, Complex Subject and Object Infinitival constructions either. In English there are no noun cases, gender, etc. English sentence word order is fixed and differs from that of Ukrainian, where subject group is often placed after predicate group, which requires syntactical transformations in translation.

The second group of grammatical difficulties is connected with different content volume of forms and constructions similar in both languages. Thus, Present tense of verb-predicate in Ukrainian corresponds in its meaning the forms of Present Indefinite, Present Continious and partially Present Perfect.

Grammatical phenomena of original texts, having functional characteristics different from corresponding ones of the translation language make the third group of grammatical differences. For example, forms of singular and plural are present in both languages, but the forms of specific nouns do not always coinside (English word “evidence” is used only in singular, but in translation has singular and plural (одне свідчення, багато свідчень).

Certain grammatical phenomena have different frequency characteristics in English and Ukrainian scientific-technical literature. In English the frequency of Passive Voice of the verb-predicate is much higher, than in Ukrainian, therefore in translation these forms are frequenly replaced by the forms of Active Voice. A number of English expressions are translated into Ukrainian by way of grammatical transformations. Otherwise this type of translation will be a word-for-word or literal translation, which violates the grammatical norms of Ukrainian and stylistic morms of scientific-technical literature in particular:

A new element will be discovered sooner or later.

Новий елемент буде відкрито раніше чи пізніше.

In Ukrainian translation the violation of comparative forms of adverbs is observed. In similar cases the form of positive degree and not comparative one is used:

Рано чи пізно новий елемент буде відкрито.

The following word-for-word translation distorts the meaning of oroginal and violates some grammatical norms of Ukrainian when Participial construction can not be introduced by conjunction, and possessive pronoun should have the form “свій”, not “його”:

While taking part in the discussion he advanced his famous theory.

Коли, беручи участь у дискусії, він висунув його відому теорію.

The correct translation is:

Саме під час цієї дискусії він висунув свою знану тепер теорію.

Translation is often accompanied by removal or omission of articles and by certain lexical transformations, if as a result of their application the structure and word order is not changed in the sentence translated:

This is the phenomenon of diffraction.

Це – явище дифракції.

It is one of the basic questions of any science.

Це є одним з головних питань будь-якої науки.