Science and language

The Jakarta Post:Sat, 04/19/2008 12:24 PM|Opinion

Going through the fast development of biological science, Indonesian scientists realize that the development of sciences should go hand in hand with the development of language. As an example, the National Bioethics Commission (KBN) consulted the Language Center of the National Education Ministry (Pusat Bahasa Departemen Pendidikan Nasional) to find the Indonesian term (the translation) for the word "stem cell".
It has been decided that the term could be translated as "sel punca". This little and trivial effort concerning language is very important for Indonesian language in order to keep up with the rapid development of knowledge.

In my opinion, technical terms are very hard to translate. I support the idea about the harmonization of language and science. I hope that this will help our professional translators to cope with such technical problems and likely it will improve the quality of scientific text translated into Indonesian.

This will make Indonesia language more independent and dynamic in transferring knowledge without any misperceptions about special terms or words.

INTAN PERMATASARI
Surakarta, Central Java