Alexander Strobel Faculty of Psychology, TU Dresden

2022-01-26

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Introduction

Properly naming things is sometimes essential. This is most important for scientific terms, where we often encounter the so-called jingle-jangle fallacies, but is also an issue when it comes to institutions or files, to mention only two of the most dissimilar things to name. Here, it is exemplarily outlined how we at AG.DPP at TU Dresden name things.

Scientific terms

In prose, using the same term all the time is regarded as something one should avoid. Yet, in science, terms are often defined which is why we avoid using synonyms for defined terms. Also, it can be confusing to read something like:

The NEO-FFI is a personality questionnaire with 60 items ... The BFI2 is an assessment instrument comprising 60 statements ...
The PANAS is a list of 24 adjectives that can be used to describe ...

If you are no personality psychologist, you might wonder if these are different types of assessment instruments containing different types of measurements. So we always refer to questionnaires as questionnaires and to items as items.

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Institutions

At TU Dresden, most institutions insist on having their names not translated into English. There is no such thing as a Dresden University of Technology or a Technical University Dresden. There is only the Technische Universität Dresden or TU Dresden for short. These two terms are the only acceptable for usage in, e.g., affiliations. This is simply because if you want to retrieve statistics on TU Dresden's performance, e.g., in terms of citations, but also in terms of mentions in the media or so on, it is extremely annoying to search for all the terms that some researchers at TU Dresden thought would be the appropriate English translation of our institution.

Speaking of affiliations, the second- and third-most common affiliation apart from TU Dresden will be our chair and faculty. It is given like this:

• German: Professur Differentielle und Persönlichkeitspsychologie, Fakultät Psychologie, Technische Universität Dresden
• English: Chair of Differential and Personality Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden

No "Professur für ..." in German, and while "Differential and Personality Psychology" in English does not seem the correct translation, I herited from my predecessor and was too lazy to have it changed (to "Chair of Personality and Individual Differences", which IMHO would be more appropriate). Especially no "Lehrstuhl für"! Although there are several meanings attached to this term, it often refers to a professor (usually of the W3 salary level) who is somehow superordinate to other professors (usually of the W2 salary level) in terms of having to decide on how to spend money or to allocate resources and having cushioned chairs at the Faculty Board meeting while the W2 professors have not. We at TU Dresden have nothing like this (especially no cushioned chairs, neither for W3 nor for W2). Also, there is no rationally or otherwise justifiable reason why we still have this differentiation into W2 and W3 professorships, so we should not continue to use terms that are fit to keep the old days alive.

There are other institutions at TU Dresden you might want to name and abbreviate in a document written in English. Here are some examples how to do so (and you can get the preferred English translation of any other TU Dresden facility by accessing their main webpage in English language):

• Zentrum für Hochleistungsrechnen und Informationsdienste (ZIH) is translated into Center for Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH)
• Kontaktstelle Forschungsdaten ...
• SLUB ...
• Graduiertenakademie ...
• Zentrum für Weiterbildung ...

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Folder structures and files

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