Scientific and Technical Translation (Performances, Seminars, Lectures, Reports)

Speaking on the basis of scientific works, articles, monographies intended for experts and the given sphere of knowledge belong to this kind of interpreting. It means, that the recipient is an expert (translator, usually, is not an expert).

Scientific speech serves for rendering cognitiveinformation. Numerous language devices provide its arrangement as objective information requiring equivalent rendering:

• as a subject, key noun in the given sphere of knowledge or the means of secondary nomination (personal and demonstrative pronouns, adverbs) are used. Personal pronouns in singular with the meaning of subject occur seldom, and are replaced by pronoun “ we ” as object;

• various means of passivity in relation to a formal subject: special verbal forms, impersonal and indefinite-personal sentences;

• prevalence of present time of verb – informed data as absolutely objective;

• abundance of compound words and words with abstract meaning, constructed according word-formation model;

• high level of generalization and objectivity (especially in Russian and Ukrainian);

• nominative feature of the text – expression of action mainly through a verbal noun with desemantisized verb of speech, that raises the level of abstractiveness.

Abundanceof terms – self-regulated lexical apparatus, developed for rendering cognitive information is the basis of scientific speech, its feature. Terms are mono-semantic, do not possess emotional coloring and are independent of context. To render them mono-semantic correspondences-equivalents, independent of context, are used. Replacement of terms with close words (descriptive translation) is possible in case they are unknown or due to any difficulties.

Other words are unvaried, monotonous enough in structure (to analyze, process, development, to come to conclusion, etc.). These words are called general scientific layer of terminology, or lexicon of general scientific description. It is deprived of emotional coloring, it is a neutral variant of modern literary norm where stylistically equal synonymy is widely developed (play important role, have great value, considerable enough, etc.). When translating lexicon of general scientific description one should choose something in between equivalents and variant correspondences as the majority of variants are interchangeable, and all of them are neutral. Translator thus can be guided by a common language (non-technical) dictionary.

In scientific performance the means raising the level of cognitive information densityare used.