How close is German scientific language to the English one?

Question

I study chemical engineering at my university in Brazil and I started a German course not long ago. I was wondering if the German scientific terms from chemistry, physics and math follow a pattern as it does in English. That's because I've got to look for English books, papers and articles all the time (there aren't as many in Portuguese and sometimes the translations aren't as precise as I need it to be). The last terms I searched were (all from organic chemistry) :

Hyperconjugation

resonance effect

inductive effect

I'd also like to apologize in advance if I'm posting this in the wrong place and ask where the best place would be.

Edit: the pattern I refered to is that most scientific words in English are similar to the Portuguese ones, probably because the words come from Latin. Here are some translations:

Hyperconjugation = hiperconjugação

resonance effect = efeito de ressonância

inductive effect = efeito de indução

There are other words such as

derivative = derivada

chain rule = Regra da cadeia

These are very intuitive translations and I'd like to know if the same occurs when I translate English scientific language to German.

Answer 1

Where the words used derive from their Latin or Greek technical terms, most are very similar to identical.

However, you need to be careful of specific differences. For example elements can be named differently (sodium versus Natrium). And also, sometimes there is a pair whereof the English name derives from Latin while the German name doesn’t (acetic acid and Essigsäure). Or, since you specifically listed that: derivative is often Ableitung in German; a native German word rather than a Latin-derived one. One particularly terrible one is nitrogen where the German term is Stickstoff — but the French one is azote which derives from a different Greek term than the English one!

Answer 2

You have to look up every single term.

In the 19th century effects have been often named after their discoverers, even if the discoverer himself had another idea. For example Röntgen's X-Strahlen are X-rays in English, a literal translation, while in German they are named Röntgenstrahlen, and no one knows what X-Strahlen should mean.

As you asked about chemistry, for example a lot of minerals have completely different names in English. Plus, the international nomenclature follows the German Strunz systematic while the Anglo-American Dana systematic is also widely used. So you have to lookup both.

Trivial names of substances also differ a lot.

EDIT: After you clarified your question, I looked up inductive effect and found it's called Induktiver Effekt in German, while resonance effect is called Mesomerie in German. So the statement is still valid: you have to lookup every term.

Answer 3

I can only speak about German/English but would expect that similar rules apply to Portuguese as well. From my experience as a physicist, terms that derive from recent (from 2nd half of 20th century onwards) are more often than not the same or direct translation s of an English term since most research/publications are in English.

On the other hand commonly used terms like common elements (Natrium/sodium...) tend to be very different. More obscure elements on the other hand can have the same name.

At some point (early 20th c.) German was a major language of science, so there might even be some German origin words like eigen, x-Strahlen...

Answer 4

There is also some overlap in the other direction, i.e. because German terms were installed in English:

Zitterbewegung (coined by Schrödinger), Bremsstrahung (breaking radiation), Nullstellensatz (Hilbert's pivotal algebraic geometry theorem), Eigenvalues and Eigenvectors, (un)gerade wave functions (only in chemistry, though), and general common procedures like Gedankenexperiment (thought experiment) and Ansatz (educated guess)

are used in English but are German words. I'm sure the list is far larger.

Answer 5

rather different; but in a way that makes scientific german better and clearer then scientific english; see most scientific german words are "self-defining"; they remember their own meanings and need no memorization; because they are built out of roots used in ordinary colloquial German; I will go so far that I will openly state that despite not being that fluent in german; I understand the technical vocabulary of german better then that of english for this reason; for example "Wasserstoff" (water-stuff) for 'hydrogyn'; "Sauerstoff" (sour/acidic stuff) for 'oxygyn' to name just a couple of examples; but the german words are self explanatory; the so called "engnlish" words are not; they are made entirely out of roots that have no place in coloqial english; honestly i think if people want to use greek and latin roots; they should be obligated to speak greek or latin instead of english; so german is much better then english regarding scientific vocabulary.