Abstract

Aim: The aim of this study is to demonstrate the problems in Turkish used in the Abstract Book of Turkish National Congresses of Pediatric Surgery via examples, and to discuss about the measures that are required for solving them.

Materials and Method: In the study words, and sentence constructions in 33 of 34 Turkish National Congresses of Pediatric Surgery were analyzed. The 9^th National Congress that had been organized within the context of International Congress of Pediatric Surgery in 1989 was not included.

Results: The most frequent problems in usage of words were to use “invented” Turkish-like words, unnecessary foreign or Turkish words, and, different writings for the same words. Most common letter errors were due to usage of English keyboard for Turkish texts and, mostly for this reason there were no “ç,ş,ö,ü,İ” letters in the proper Turkish names. There were innumerable misconstructed sentences and errors in expressions in the titles of the presented studies.

Conclusion: The conventional approach to the problems of scientific Turkish is to focus on the usage of unnecessary foreign words. The errors observed in this study have shown that, the problem is not so simple and reaches to a level of not be able to express scientific thoughts clearly. The problems of our language usage are very serious but not unrecoverable. The first and the most simple steps are to respect our mother language, to re-control the scientific writings for correcting grammatical and expressional errors before sending them to a congress or journal, and to charge Turkish proofreader committees in congress organizations and journals.