Seminars

The translator's commandments to researchers

On 24 May, the final seminar of the DLNP Scientific Communications Group project "Useful skills of a researcher" was held in the conference hall of the Laboratory of Nuclear Problems and online. The leading translator of the Laboratory Mikhail I.Potapov presented the report "Organization and style of a scientific article in English".

Mikhail Ivanovich spoke about the style standards adopted by the International Academic Company "Science/Interperiodica" (IAC) that publishes most Russian scientific texts in Russian and English versions. He invited the audience to consider the main parts of a scientific article, modern features of their design in English, including spelling, punctuation, abbreviations, numerals, units of measurement and to become familiar with the intricacies of using the English language. We offer excerpts from his speech to the attention of our readers.

"So, the article begins with a title, in which all words except for function words must be written with a capital letter. Only the present tense should be used in the article abstract. As a digression, I will note that sometimes, I observe excessive zeal in the use of the Present Perfect. No need! It is advisable to use passive constructions. Instead of We consider the problem of ... it is better to use The problem of ... is considered.

In the Acknowledgments section, the word thankful is inappropriate, it is too emotional for the scientific style that does not allow the creation of images. The scientific style is tough and brief!" Mikhail Ivanovich shared his many years of experience as a translator.

Today, each scientific article must have the following sections: Funding and Conflict of Interest, he explained what needs to be mentioned in them in different cases. The last part of the article - "Conclusion" - is written in the plural in English - Conclusions.

Afterwards, the speaker moved on to stylistic nuances that mainly concern spelling and punctuation. He focused on examples of changes in English spelling, when it changed from British to American. The scientific style of IAC uses American spelling.

He spoke about the peculiarities of punctuation and in particular, the use of a comma, sometimes different from the use in Russian, we learned about the Oxford comma. Even those who do not recognize it, believe that it helps in certain cases, allows one to better understand the meaning of a sentence. An important feature of the comma: in addition to a small number of rules where it is must, it allows for the author's use - if the author believes that it is necessary to stop the reader's attention in some place, then, he will put a comma. And here the speaker recalled M. Gorky with a huge number of author's dashes in the texts. In English, there are also two main styles of using dashes. We learned about the peculiarities of using short and long dashes. The long dash is not separated from the text by spaces and this is immediately noticeable. The short dash can be used instead of a colon, but if the text requires formality, then it is better to use the latter.

An interesting story turned out to be with abbreviations. In American English, all abbreviations are written with periods, although there is a tendency to create exceptions - they are not used, for example, in scientific degrees. In British English, if an abbreviation is formed by the first and last letters of a word (for example, Dr, Mr, Ms), then the English will never put a period, as in initials.

"I kindly ask you not to put the ordinal suffixes -st, -nd, -rd, -th as a superscript, but to write them in a line (for example, 1st, not 1^st, 2nd, not 2^nd, etc.), do not Frenchify the English language!" he addressed the audience and then focused on the intricacies of using units of measurement. "I would like to remind you that the numerical value and the unit of measurement are always written with a space, but in our style and not only in it, the percent and temperature signs with the scale indication are written without a space; the liter is designated by the capital L. For some reason, not everyone uses the capital letter Ω, approved in the SI system, to designate resistance; Ohm's full name is often written in English. And do not forget that all symbols of physical quantities are written in italics!"

Turning to the topic of the special use of English words, the speaker noted that the incorrect use of the verb to allows followed by the infinitive is becoming less common, but still occurs: it allows to measure - this is a gross mistake! The correct translation would be it allows us to measure or it allows measuring. "The word "actual" has various meanings, although I constantly come across exactly this attempt at translation. Actual is translated as real, genuine and it can be translated with the words topical, relevant or the more emotional word hot. There is no need to translate pioneering as pioneering, even if you have never been a pioneer. Boys, have any of you read Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking novels? The first of the novels is called "The pioneers", that is, first movers. Therefore, it should be translated as pioneering, but it does not really correspond to the scientific style, so we translate it as fundamental, this recommendation was adopted back in the days of the USSR."

The speaker answered all the questions that concerned the participants of the seminar and there was also advice from them to present his speech in writing. The seminar turned out to be quite useful and will surely help many employees of the Institute.

Olga TARANTINA,
photo by Elena PUZYNINA