Technical English

The great technical and scientific achievements of our age have urged very many people to study foreign languages. Besides students and postgraduates of institutions of higher learning, foreign languages are studied by people of different profession, for they find that many of the books written on their subjects are in English. French or German. Nowadays technical English is very popular in our country.

Let us examine the relation between ordinary English and technical English. Let us see what common features they have, what the peculiarities of technical English are. Vocabulary, grammar and style are factors to be taken into consideration.

There are a number of reasons why technical writing is rather difficult. But it is not so very different from those everyday phrases and sentences which the students learn in class.

If you want to understand technical English, you've got to have a thorough knowledge of ordinary everyday sentences with their grammatical constructions, their vocabulary and rules of word-building.

When speaking we normally use short sentences. It often happens that we start saying one thing and then change our minds half-way through, and finish by saying something different. To make ourselves clearer we often repeat what we have said or make ourselves clearer by gestures, or by the tone of our voice.

It goes without saying that we cannot do such things when we write. Everything has to be thought out carefully before we begin. The words we intend to use have to be more precise, and our sentences more carefully constructed.

Everyday English is mostly about people, their activities and their feelings. Therefore we can say that it is quite personal. But scientific and technical writing is usually about things, matter, natural processes, and tries to be very impersonal. The scientist usually keeps himself, his

feelings and his personality out of his work. He regards himself as an observer only. He records what exists or what happens, as if he himself were absent. This impersonal attitude of the scientist and engineer towards their subject makes a considerable difference to the language habit and patterns they use in writing, and. to some extent, in speaking.

While carrying on an ordinary conversation we usually use the active form. In technical English the process the writer describes sounds is mechanical, unchanging and inhuman. The one who does the writing tries to disappear from the scene. For this reason the passive form is commonly used in such sentences as: This was done. That was taken. But not: I did it. or / took it.

You will hardly ever find a sentence beginning with T Instead, you have the impersonal Mt': it is suggested, it can be stated, it is expected, it is evident,, etc. The scientist, being interested in the causes of things, usually uses in sentences: by. by means of, due to. thanks to. because of, by virtue of, owing to, etc.

Isolated facts or events are seldom dealt with by the engineer, usually it is a whole series of connected events that have to be described. Besides, the engineer has to show what the connection is. He may have to show not only what happens, but also how it happens, when it happens, why it happens, and what the effect of it is. All these are usually lied closely together, and cannot be talked about separately.

The problem of vocabulary causes a lot of difficulty, though it is not the only problem that matters. One cannot follow a technical discussion or read a technical book unless one knows the words and expressions that are being used. Scientists, in trying to define things accurately, have been making up technical words for hundreds of years. At present a very' great number of new words are needed as new fields of science open and new discoveries are made.

In using ordinary language we help our listeners to form pictures in their minds that are exactly the same as the pictures in our own minds. Street, house, bridge, magazine, woman, man, children are very easy pictures to see. But technical words often mean complicated things and processes. Therefore it takes the listeners mind a little longer to see these pictures. One has to be very familiar with the things technical words describe, and only then the picture-building becomes automatic.

Each branch of science and technology has its separate vocabulary. Chemists and doctors use many of the same words, and so do geologists and engineers. But fortunately for all of us. the number of words one has to know in any particular science is limited. Besides, many of these highly

technical terms are more or less similar in several languages. This is usually because the words have been built up from Greek or Latin roots. If you know the subject well in your own language, you will recognize many of the technical words when you read them in English. The only difficulty is to pronounce them correctly.

Examples: electrolysis, condenser, magnesium, convulsive.

More than half of all the vocabulary of science comes from a Greek-Latin group, and is therefore quite likely to be international. Another group of words we are interested in are the semi-technical ones; they are not big and frightening words to look at, but they sometimes cause great difficulty to the Russian student.

Such words as movement, moment, work, power, energy, fracture, valve, junction, flux, load, stress, strain, etc.are semi-technical words for two reasons. First, because a large number of them were not made specially for a definite scientific purpose, but have simply been borrowed from our everyday English. They may be very familiar in everyday life, but when they are used in a scientific context, they may have a different meaning altogether. The word power, for example, is very common in ordinary speech, but it has a very special meaning in mathematics, and another special meaning in engineering. The second reason why they are called semi-technical is that they are often more general in their application, and many of them will be extremely useful no matter what your subject is. Words, for example, like temperature, diameter, plastic, agent, atom, carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, etc. are partof thecommon vocabulary of all the scientists.

There are also many words which have become part and parcel of the phraseology of scientific writing and communication, and you may not very often find them in ordinary speech, or writing. Most of them are rather heavy words coming from Greek or Latin. In everyday use we would normally find shorter words to say the same thing.

Example: Steam is exhausted from the cylinder —Steam is pushed out of the cylinder.

The simple phrases are sometimes used in lectures or when an engineer or a scientist is explaining how things work.

At present great work is being carried out not only in making the existing terms more precise, but also in reducing their existing number.