Estudio contrastivo de las aclaraciones en la comunicación científica, ejemplificada en artículos de ecología en castellano, inglés y alemán.

Abstract

In research articles, the authors and their readers share essentially the same baggage of technical and scientific knowledge. Therefore, definitions and explanations are generally limited to the introduction of new concepts or terms or to new definitions of a concept already existing. By doing so, the authors seek a more efficient communication, getting implied as well in the use of concepts and terms for their discipline. This article take its starting point from the defining or explanatory microcontexts registered in a trilingual corpus of original research articles in Spanish, English and German (135.000 words overall). It presents a proposal of classification of these comprehension aids by constellations and categories and analyses their characteristics and frequency of use in the corpus, especially from a cross-cultural point of view of scientific communication. The differences encountered are exposed and the implications for writing and translating such specialized texts are highlighted in the conclusions.