Evaluation of Persian Academy approved genetics terms acceptance in upper graduate user population

Abstract

Finding Persian equivalents for scientific terms is one of the aims of Academy of Persian language and literature, and more than 50 scientific committees are now working on this scope in terminology department of the academy. Genetics and biotechnology terminology committee is one of these teams that started his activity from 2009 and since then approved more than 500 of these terms for use in academic fields. In this research 101 questionnaires including 20 questioned term were given to more than 101 upper graduate users including MSc and PhD students and academic staff of randomly selected universities in Tehran and Semnan provinces. And then the evaluation of their acceptance was carried out by a model given by Cooper for the Study of Language Spread. All 20 studied terms were randomly selected from genetic approved terms and divided in to two groups: newly coined equivalents (those equivalents that was newly coined by the committee) and selected equivalents (those that have the selected equivalent before). Results gathered and analyzed with statistical tests, and showed that most of accepted terms are among selected equivalents. By another words the newly coined terms has much less acceptability than the others. This research introduces a method for evaluation of approved Persian equivalents of scientific terms and besides show the state of some of these equivalents between user populations. The important point is that term selection for scientific terms including genetic terms; is not an obligatory rule, but is a proposal for meeting the researchers need to strength Persian language as a scientific language. And usage of these equivalents is completely on the part of researchers and students and their point of view to equivalents.