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

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.

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