How to translate “sprecyzować”

“Sprecyzować” CANNOT be translated as “precise”. “Precise” is an adjective (przymiotnik), while “sprecyzować” is a verb (czasownik). Nonetheless, mistakes like the one below are very common:

WRONG
The agreement does not precise which of its terms survive its termination.

I admit that “precise” does look and sound a little like “sprecyzować”, and it does have a similar sort of meaning. But the correct translation of “sprecyzować” is actually “specify”, which – I think you’ll agree – also looks and sounds quite similar to “sprecyzować”, but has the advantage of also being a verb. An alternative translation is “define”.

So the above sentence should read as follows:

RIGHT
The agreement does not specify which of its terms survive its termination.

Remember that you can ONLY use the word “precise” as an adjective, like in the following sentences:

Please ensure that you pay the precise amount of cash, as we cannot guarantee that we will have any change.

My colleague has a very precise knowledge of antitrust legislation.

Advertisement
This entry was posted in Dla Polaków and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s