Use and Translation of Conditional Sentences in Institutional Register and Popular Scientific Prose

Abstract

In a world characterised by cross-cultural communication, scientific and institutional languages have become increasingly important for linguists and translators. The characteristics of scientific and institutional languages clearly distinguish them from other types of registers. In terms of translation, texts in both registers under analysis should render exact meaning and context of the original text through clear, unequivocal lexis and concise, unambiguous grammar. This particular study focuses on conditional sentences in EU documents and popular science texts and attempts to uncover dominant patterns of the order of clauses in such sentences and whether the particular order is retained during the process of translation. The level of language formality in the two registers seems to be different, being higher in the institutional texts and, thus, imposing a more straightforward rendering of particular grammatical structures. More complex sentence structures with the con¬ditional clause taking the middle position in a sentence are, therefore, expected to be more frequently observed in institutional texts. Likewise, an assumption is made that exactly the same ordering of clauses in a conditional sentence is rendered in another language more frequently in institutional than in science popular texts.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.25.8562