Regulatory documents

Regulatory documents, also referred to as normative documents, are explicit sets of rules governing the requirements for products, materials or services. Documents of this type are essentially specifications which provide clear, com­prehensive and unambiguous descriptions of, for example, what a product is required to do, what characteristics a material should have or the way in which a service is to be provided. Specifications can take a more formal form in the shape of directives, laws or standards which are written by standards organiza­tions (such as ISO, DIN or BSI), by trade organizations or government bodies. Standards seek to normalize and homogenize the design of products or materials or to regulate and standardize certain activities.

In both cases, regulatory documents may have a legal dimension, whether as a means of enforcement, as a justification of necessity or prevention. As such, there is a certain amount of overlap with legal translation and the documents may contain varying amounts of legal terminology and constructions as well as highly specific and detailed technical descriptions. The legal dimension is par­ticularly apparent in the case of patents, where the aim is to protect or license an invention, i.e. the inventor's intellectual property, by giving the inventor the right to exclude others from making, using, selling or importing the invention (see DeMatteis et al. 2006).

Translating such documents requires meticulous attention to detail to ensure factual accuracy in the first instance, as well as compliance with specific linguistic requirements. An example of this comes in the form of what are known as "EMEA templates"¹. These are quality review templates produced by the European Medicines Agency and used to ensure the quality of documents by defining the format, layout and wording of product information for medicines. Product information must be produced in accordance with these templates as it forms an integral part of the licensing and approval process and, if it is deficient in any way, the medicines may be withdrawn. The standards are very strict and they stipulate specific headings, spellings², phrases which have established meanings in 22 official European Union languages, as well as Icelandic and Norwegian. The fact that the templates are available in such a wide range of languages makes them quite useful for translators, as they constitute a ready-made and approved terminology resource.

Another example of a regulatory or normative text, again relating to medicine, is the British National Formulary. This document provides scientific definitions and descriptions of medicines before giving practical, technical information (including prices) relating to medicines. Similarly, national and international pharmacopoeias set out precise instructions for preparing medicines and explain which compounds are currently permissible.

Popular science

Popular science is a generic term consisting of science writing and science jour­nalism. The aim of popular science is to provide an interpretation of scientific material for a general audience who are outside the mainstream scientific com­munity. Whereas popular science books are broad in their choice and treatment of topics, science journalism such as that seen in the likes of the Popular Science tends to focus on specific themes and recent developments.

In contrast to scientific writing such as journal papers and monographs, popu­lar science seeks to present the observations, data and conclusions produced by scientists in an accessible way. The aim is to entertain and to educate, possibly even to provoke, but the end result is that much of the modality or cautious "hedging" that occurs in scientific texts is often absent from popular science texts because of the need to simplify or generalize scientific principles.

An interesting dimension of popular science is that it can be written either by scientists or by journalists with varying levels of scientific knowledge. The result is that certain examples of popular science may closely border what could be regarded as literary works, with all of the rhetorical devices and creative language that this entails.

In terms of identifying features, popular science texts will combine termin­ology, abbreviations and equations etc. from scientific texts and combine it with the linguistic features common in either literary or journalistic texts. The hybrid nature of popular science as a whole may even result in the use of unusual de­vices such as dialogues, story-telling, metaphors, role-plays, cartoons, extracts from other document types such as recipes, songs, poems, diaries, dramatic texts and so on, in order to ensure that texts are informative and entertaining. The flexibility required in order to convey complex information in an easy-to-understand way means that popular science texts can be particularly demanding for translators.

1 You can download the templates by going to the European Medicines Agency website [www. ema.europa.eu] and searching for "product information templates".

2 The templates even stipulate the use of upper and lower case characters, albeit implicitly. Certain headings are written in upper case, while others are not and while the templates do not specifically tell you to copy this, your work may be sent back for correction if you not fol­low the templates closely enough.