Translating Turkish academic paper abstracts into English: syntactic mistakes

The study aims to analyze the modern translations of Turkish academic paper abstracts into English and to contribute to the special translation theory and Turkish comparative linguistics. The study suggests that literal translation from Turkish into English causes English scientific speech syntactic mistakes that negatively affect the academic paper's author's credibility. Syntactic differences and the academic style linguacultural differences between Turkish and English show that English academic style prefers short, precise, and simple structures and sentences, while Turkish academic style has strict word order and complex sentences and often uses verbal nouns. We analyzed Turkish scientific papers on psychology, law, sociology, medicine, and exact sciences with parallel translations into English. Almost half of the papers contain syntactic mistakes, with most of them relating to the wrong adverbial modifier position. The findings show that literal translation is not effective because of the significant differences in both languages. Thus, complex translation transformations are required.