INTERLINGUAL TRANSFER IN THE TRANSLATION OF SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL TEXTS

The rapid development of science and technology over the last fifty years (Chapt. 2) has created a need for a better understanding of, and an insight into, the linguistic strategies that facilitate communication not only among scientists and engineers, but also among experts as well as laymen. To uncover, specify, and demonstrate linguistic similarities and differences between the quotidian language of the general populace and the Languages for Special Purposes (LSP), is the purpose of this study.;Five scientific and/or technical texts which exhibit a cross-section of types and functions, and which allow substantial extraction of interlingual transfer features are translated and analyzed (Chapt. 4). It is found (Chapt. 5) that the five texts, while originally generated with the audience of the source language in mind, need to be reanalyzed in particular for their pragmatic parameter under interlingual transfer. Zero equivalency, i.e., that a text or text fraction may be untranslatable, is denied. The interlingual transfer of purely scientific and technical LSP texts from English to German, and the reverse, attests to strong interlingual equivalence, since both of these languages draw from a common terminological pool that includes numerous translingual icons. Contrary to QL, the number of semantic equivalences increases as a text becomes more scientific. Most interlingual differences appear to be on the grammatical, especially the syntactic level, where a scientific text tends to show less congruence between the target language and the source language.;Since LSPs function within the boundaries of quotidian language (QL) and are, to a large extent, bound by the grammatical rules and norms of QL, two sets of data, English and German, serve for the application of fifteen hypothesized interlingual transfer rules, which represent all components of the grammar, from phonological to discourse elements. This theoretical framework, based on hands-on evidence in the dynamics of language transfer, proposes the fit or compatibility, as well as the possible permutations, of three given text types with three given text functions (Chapt. 3).