Comparative Analysis of Stylistic, Lexical and Grammatical Features of English and Russian Technical Texts

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Translation of scientific and technical literature has always been recognized as a highly challenging job. On the one hand, for making a competent translation, a person who is going to do it should have knowledge in the relevant field, and on the other hand, he or she should be familiar with the features of the scientific style and the lexical and grammatical components, which are different in different languages. The aim of this study was to generalize the stylistic, lexical and grammatical features of a scientific and technical text taking the English and Russian languages as an example. The generally adopted structure of technical texts is analyzed, and a collection of the most frequently encountered phrases and expressions for particular sections of the text both in Russian and English is given. Scientific texts are considered from the syntactic, grammatical and lexical points of view. It has been concluded that from the syntax point of view, the sentences are mostly complex in nature and contain subordinate constructions and verbal clauses. Signs of compression are often encountered, which are expressed by impersonal sentences in Russian and elliptical constructions in English. The predominance of passive constructions in both languages is noted. The lexical component is governed by commonly used, general scientific vocabulary and terms. In the texts there are metaphors and imagery that help more lively convey the essence of the term on the one hand, and on the other hand they add difficulty to translating the information. An important linguistic feature of terms in technical and scientific languages is the use of complex word combinations that allow information to be set out in brief and compact form. For brevity, some of them are transformed into abbreviations. In modern scientific literature, there is a tendency toward outlining information in the maximally compact form by using certain and grammatical tools.