Agreement

This Agreement is made this ____ day of ___________, 1999, by and between _____________, [a _____________ corporation with its principal office at _____________] or [an individual with an office and mailing address at _____________] (“Agent”), and [company name], a corporation organized and existing under the laws of ______________, with its principal place of business at ______________ (__________).

In the above frame of an agreement the blank spaces represent the slots to be filled with slot fillers (date, company name, address, etc.). However, most often a text frame has the form of a standard text with stable and changeable parts.

Hence, the task of a translator in rendering official documents is to find TL equivalents of the SL text frames and use them in translation as standard substitutes, filling the slots with frame fillers in compliance with the document content.

The syntax of the official document style (officialese) is usually characterized by complex structures and the lexicon – by the highest degree of formality, set phrases for which there are standard equivalents in the TL.

e.g. hereinafter referred to –

the signatories of the present agreement shall be responsible for ensuring the observance thereof … (E sounds more formal)

the High Contracting Parties –

We, the undersigned –

The scientific prose style also has three divisions:

1. scientific style proper (scientific papers, books, etc.),

2. scientific-businesslike style (patterned literature),

3. scientific-popular style (journals, newpapers)

The proper scientific substyle is characterized by the strictly academic manner of presenting the material, the exactness of the information, purely informative way of writing, logical sequence of statements, clear proofs, and semantic clarity.

The scientific businesslike substyle is meant not only to tell some new scientific information, but also to defend it legally and lawfully. The l-ge of patterned descriptions is strictly limited and it is characterized by stereotype composition, standard l-ge means, abundance of clichés and set word combination, and unified syntactic construction.

The scientific popular substyle is meant for a non-professional readership and it makes its l-ge less scientific and more popular.

As to the lexicon of scientific/technical texts there are the following peculiarities:

1. the wide usage of terms, i.e. words and word combinations denoting special scientific/technical concepts,

2. scarcity and restriction of the vocabulary in general,

e.g. 480 most frequent terms in Theoretical Mechanics cover 91% of the text . In Geometry this rate is 88%, in Physics it makes 83%.

3. the wide use of borrowings including those from Greek and Latin,

4. the use of symbols instead of lexical units,

5. the non-terminological words and prepositions are characterized by special choice,

e.g. Prepositions: in preference to

apart from

except for

save

owing to, due to

according to

provided

for the purpose of

Adverbs: however

alternatively

thus

on the other hand

Other parts of speech: accommodate = fit, take

accomplish = do, carry out

apparent = clear, plain

attempt = try

bilateral = two-sided,

consequently = so

continuous = steady, unbroken

criterion = test, rule, standard

deficiency = lack

diminish = lessen, drop

disengage = free, let go, etc.

As to the grammar of the E s/t texts,

1. the length of sentences which are 1.7 times longer than in fiction as there are much more definitions,

2. most of the sentences are complex ones; thus the wide usage of conjunctions,

3. there are many participles, infinitive and gerund constructions,

4. the preference for Passive Voice as far as the chief attention is directed to the facts, not actors. ( Passive constructions rate 29.4% in s/t literature and 4.23% in fiction),

5. the facts are presented from the 3^rd and not the 1^st person;Imperatives abound in s/t texts:

e.g. it was decided,

it has been found expedient,

it is to be noted,

care must be taken,

it has been stated by many researchers that …

6. inversion is routinely used to point out some logically important elements,

7. wide use of cliches, or block l-ge,

e.g. if and only if

a cut-and-tried method

to confine oneself to the subject

to come to a conclusion, to arrive at a conclusion

in the neighbourhood of …, in the vicinity of …

for all we know

for a variety of reasons

given that, on condition that,

8. the way of presenting the material in s/t texts is neutral, dry, devoid of emotional colouring; the collective pronoun “we” is used instead of “I”.

However, in experimental scientific papers:

1. the l-ge is not always clear from the point of view of grammar or logic, there may be clumsy sentences, overcrammed with information, too long definitions, redundancy of clichés, tautology, professional slang words, polysemantic words, redundant synonyms and duplets,

2. the style within the same paper may differ, especially if the paper is written by a group of authors,

3. papers sometimes contain new hypotheses and thus introduce new terms,

4. papers are easier to translate as extralinguistic information is more important in papers than in books; papers are written and sometimes edited by researchers,

5. papers contain schemes, graphs, drawings, formulae, etc.,

6. misprints are abundant; the tr-tor has to find and correct them,

7. a psychological barrier exists: a linguist-tr-tor has problems with the field of study; the tr-tor-engineer neglects dictionaries and tries to correct the author’s mistakes.