1. Newspaper Style
In this type of texts appeared all the changes we mentioned in introduction including change of a topic and origin. Moreover, with spreading of the democracy there has been present a wider circle of the authors of these texts. The democracy has brought significant liberalization of the laws, which used to be not only for choice of the topic, structure and text composition, but also for the stylistic means. Utterance has the footprints of the author`s personality – his origin, education, psychological set-up and social integration. There is a significant amount of calques, professional expressions and slang. You can feel an influence of the time pressure and psychical stress authors have to deal with – written newspaper style is not as precise as it used to be. Not only unwritten rules are followed less, but also even written laws are not observed anymore. A considerable task is played by the spread of means of mass communication, a try to get closer to the recipient and the fact, that articles and books are written by people who are often seen on TV, people from writer-reader meetings, lecturers at schools and so on. It is typical for popular – scientific articles in top American magazines (Economist, Newsweek, Time), the ambition to offer not only information, but also to attract reader, even confound him. The authors of these texts are not only perfectly prepared scientifically; they bring something more, non-reccuring style as a display of their newspaper personality. An article has an intensity, a gradation, a movement and a little of the story too. A paise of the discovery or emphasis of the importance of a big idea is gradated in the end up to the final point. It is usually a taught of philosophical character. Linguistic means for the author of this kind of the text are very various. We have figurative comparisons, more or less used collocations, even phraseology, biblical analogy, then characters, events or places from the history symbolizes certain period, metaphor. They are stylistics means of the top author of a popular article in magazines mentioned above. All of this usually fit on a very little space with almost no connecting words or connections.
2. Publicistic Style – Language of Essay
Language is extremely sensitive to changes in natural and social science. Enormous accumulation and change of information brought by everyday changes is joined with translation of great amount of books and publications to the national languages. Presentation of the results of scientific research in the world is not a matter of the scientific prose style only, but the elements and methods of style of literary works are present there too. According to more circumstantial evidence we may suppose that translation itself influences and brakes stylistic norms and traditions of the national stylistics. This genre is starting to be used for presentation of the results of the scientific research not only in the liberal arts, but also mainly in natural-scientific fields. The language of an essay is rich in emotionally colored words, which evoke an aesthetic experience, terms, archaisms and neologisms. An essay is anthropocentric, it has strenght of an intuition, and it joints the originality of the knowledge with an aesthetic effect, what influences all our senses. It represents sort of uniting two at first sight contradictory worlds, scientific and everyday ones.
3. Scientific Style – Professional and Academic Level
The language of much specialists today, particularly perhaps in the Social sciences, is very far from being colloquial and informal. It is often difficult for the layman to read. It is not only that technical terms are used; a technical term is often a kind of shorthand for a concept that it would need a sentence to express in plain language. The reader who is prepared to explore a specialist subject will be ready to learn and accept a reasonable number of technical terms. But he is often faced with a ponderous abstract jargon that seems to obscure rather than clarify meaning. The specialist seems reluctant to write the language of ordinary men if he can possibly avoid it. It is reassuring to hear a scientist say that scientific writing need to be a specialist jargon. “Perhaps some specialists, who are only human beings, like to feel that there is an element of mystery and obscurity in their researches. To express their facts and findings too plainly in the language of common use might dissipate the special aura that surrounds them.” There is even a tendency to “artificial grandiloquence” , and the ponderous usage of “piling up before a noun of words that are not adjectives but are used adjectivally.” Thus scientific writers take too little trouble to be clear and simple: “Instead of writing ‘because the surface of the retina is spherical`, they substitute ‘because of the sphericity of the retinal surface`. Instead of saying that something is near the nucleus, they say that it ‘occupies a juxta-nuclear position`... In ordinary speech or writing it would never enter anyone`s head to say ‘a tea containing cup`; one would naturally say ‘a cup of tea`.”
Translator very rarely works on pure scientific article, because experts who wrote them read original articles in English. There is usually an expression of the approach or a method of solving the problem. These chapters often contain philosophical problematic, while authors are inspired by everything possible from oriental philosophy through alchemy and spiritual texts included. They are looking for contact points, a motivation, an analogy and arguments to support their opinion. That`s why images, similes or metaphor are used in the text. The same is at the end of the work, where author tries to present his results in order to get them closer to the reader. So, he uses again mentioned inventory of the linguistic means. As an example for the revival of the boring scientific text are expressions like “charm, colour, smell” used for certain qualities of the description of the elemental corpuscles. Similarly in astrophysics the use of the expression “black hole”. In the history of physics there is possible to follow the fact, that during the adaptation of new expressions are used with analogies to other fields, while there are analogies formal or often terminological. That`s why we have expressions like “electric flow” or “electromagnetic field”, but we do not sense them same way anymore. Scientific style has its own language peculiarity, which are reflected mainly in a field of terminology. “English terminology is borrowed mostly from Greek and Latin, and from the point of intelligibility it is a stumbling-block either for layman speaker or recipient.”
4. Popular – Scientific style
Mainly, this type of text is in scientific-popular book. It has very similar features we talk about in the case of popularising article. The choice of styles and subgroups of the styles is not so rich. Not many writers dare to write this type of book. Lately, appeared many books, which were written
a) by the excellent scientists themselves, under careful guidance of redactor or editor (such as Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time)
b) by an important scientist together with a publicist (such as H.Ledermann, The God Particle)
c) about scientists (such as Kitty Ferguson, Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything ).
These circumstances bring new moments. In the first casebook is strongly marked by the personality of a big scientist: the choice of topic, structure of the text, expressional means and so on. Since the showing of the scientific matter mixes with memories and philosophical thoughts it is obvious that means of style of literary texts are used here. The author is present, has an opinion, text is emotional and expressional, it has a form of a dialogue, used lexis, collocations and sometimes even syntax all are original. In two other kinds of books we deal with description of the scientist`s work. Interpretation of his work is connected with a description of his private life. There are used quotations from his personal correspondence, verses, faiths, which are expressed by the means of the style of the literary works.
Situation here is very similar to the one in essay, because it deals with a scientific content presented by the literary means. Though, there is a lack of action. The other literary elements are present there. They create a big task for translator, because he has to understood not only terminology, but he also has to understand original very well in order to truly translate the meaning of the text, make it comprehensible, and furthermore provide its aesthetic function.
It is faster to write a translated literature than to write original literature in many ways. It is true when it is a use of elements from the style of literary texts in non-literary texts. Unfortunately, our original scientific and specialist literature, with some exception, is often characterized in a spirit of older classifications of the linguistic styles. But in the real world of publishing all non-literary style texts move from a classical black and white strict distinction and restricted laws to more liberal criteria. The authors think more about recipient. They try to make a dialogue with a reader to get closer to him and persuade him about correctness of author`s opinion. This of course is possible in dialogue only, because truth is born in an argument. We may only think that under influence of the translation of non-literary texts authors of the original Slovak scientific and specialist publications will follow this route. We can help them to reach it by high quality attractive translations.
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