On the initiative of six students of Genetics and Experimental Biology from the Faculty of Biology at the University of Gdańsk, work is underway to create the only Polish-English dictionary in the field of broadly defined biology (from biochemistry to ecology) that can be used by all interested persons.
'The Polish-English Biology Dictionary', which UG students have been working on since August 2020, would fill a gap in the world of Polish specialist scientific translations.
- 'The dictionary will contain Polish terms and their corresponding English equivalents together with short definitions in English, which, however, do not constitute encyclopaedic information as in the case of the aforementioned dictionaries, but are more aimed at clarifying whether a given translation refers to the term the reader is referring to, which is crucial in the case of ambiguity of a given Polish or English word,' explains mgr Barbara Kubica-Daniel from CJO, the project supervisor. - 'Additionally, English terms with an irregular plural form will be provided with appropriate grammatical information.'.
The team consisting of: Marcin Banacki, Anna Barczak, Katarzyna Bryszkowska, Kacper Boguszewski, Hubert Czyż and Aleksandra Kujałowicz, has already compiled a database of biological terms, there are almost 3 thousand of them.
- 'The only currently existing biological dictionaries, both online and physical, are of the "Polish language dictionary" type, i.e. explaining the meaning of words used in this science, and thus de facto constitute more of an encyclopaedia than a dictionary,' says Marcin Banacki, a student of the Biology Department at UG. - 'There are, however, Polish-English dictionaries of medical terms - but they contain only terms directly connected with human biology, e.g. "hip", and not with biology in general, e.g. "book lungs". Therefore, the dictionary would undoubtedly be of interest to professional translators as well as students of life sciences and the scientific community of biologists,' he adds.
There are plans to publish the dictionary in a book form. Moreover, thanks to the cooperation of mgr Irena Moszczyńska-Janicka (CJO) with the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science UG, a digital version of the dictionary will also be prepared. The students of the Faculty of Mathematics, Physics and Information Technology: Jakub Chełchowski, Wiktor Morawski, Jakub Sieczczyński, Rafał Majewski, Mikołaj Lomiak and Sandra Leman - under the care of dr Hanna Furmańczyk and mgr Wojciech Łojkowski, as well as student Joanna Jaworska from the Faculty of Social Sciences UG, responsible for the development of the interface, are working on it. Completion of work on the digital version is expected this academic year.
The project is carried out under the aegis of the Centre for Foreign Languages of the University of Gdańsk, with the support of the director of this unit, Alina Swebocka, MBA and prof. dr hab. Dariusz Szlachetko, Dean of the Faculty of Biology. The project also enjoys the support of prof. dr hab. Piotr Stepnowski and Vice-Rector for Student Affairs and Education Quality, dr hab. Arnold Kłonczyński.