Forms of address and honorifics also differ from language to language. while English does not distinguish between familiar and polite 'you'. Indian languages have atleast two to three distinctions, and these are all grammatical. The same is the case with honorifics.
Languages differ in terms of tense and aspect as well. Most languages are accustomed to three basic tenses - present, past and future with some tenses of relative time - past perfect, future perfect, etc. Some languages are peculiar with a series of temporal gradations of either past or future or both. In terms of their range they vary from few minutes to a year and a more, such as past time of "a few minutes ago" or of "earlier in the day", etc. These temporal aspects have bearing on the grammar and the sentences structure as a whole.
The nature of the grammatical differences between a pair of languages varies from language to language. A comparative and contrastive analysis of the grammars of two languages, is essential before a translators ventures to take up the job of translating. These grammatical differences pose problems to the translator as it not only involves analysis of the differences but also finding accurate or proper and approximate correspondences in the target language, for effective transfer of the message. |
Technical writing is characterized by its subject matter, language and the purpose. The subject matter is essentially technical, the language used is formal and distinct as compared to ordinary speech and the purpose is communication of information. The aim in technical language is to achieve the highest degree of precision. Imprecision and ambiguity are hazards in the technical field. Vocabulary, syntax and style are the main distinguishing features of scientific and technical language, although this display of variation depends on the nature of social science texts, whether it is a text book, research book, monograph, manual or advertisement, etc. There however is no place for sentimentality in technical language, except in sales language. Generally technical texts are marked by nominal and terse sentences and impersonal styles.
Translation of scientific texts poses several problems due to the inherent differences of languages. At the syntactic level languages differ mainly on the basis of construction of clauses and sentences and the word order. You have already been told that English have subject-verb-object (SVO) word order. Most of the Indian languages have subject-object-verb (SOV) order. German has SVO as well as OVS, i.e. object-verb-subject order. A translator needs to take these peculiar features of the languages, both SL and TL into consideration, while switching over from one language to the other. One thing is very clear, that is, the translator must follow the word order of the target language with all its pecularities. This may be easier if the language has one obligatory word order, but in languages with a number of optional word orders, a translator would be faced with the problem of choosing the appropriate word order from the seemingly identical or optional patterns. The subtle distinctions in the patterns of word order presupposes an intimate, active, and long association with the language. |
