4

From "Risks from GMOs due to Horizontal Gene Transfer", by Paul Keese:

"The introduced gene could not be detected in faeces from human volunteers with intact digestive tracts following the consumption of a meal containing GM soya, indicating that the introduced gene is normally completely degraded in the large intestine."

I've been translating this article and realized that if I wrote human volunteers word-for-word in Russian - человеческие добровольцы - that would sound outlandish.

Thinking logically, what other kinds of volunteer could there be in a genetic study? Rat volunteers? Murine volunteers? Simian volunteers? Bacterial volunteers? The word volunteers implies human in this context. Yet in Russian this semantic redundancy is prominent while in English the phrase seems natural.

I would gladly accept your reflections on this topic. I expect answers from human volunteers, but since I cannot be sure that an online persona harbors a human being behind it, all other species are welcome to chip in.

CopperKettle
  • 141
  • 5

2 Answers2

1

I agree that “human volunteers” is at best pleonastic, and at worst ridiculous. It is certainly not felicitous in any language.

fdb
  • 24,134
  • 1
  • 35
  • 70
1

Human volunteers fits well into that passage. Human means that the faeces were of human, not animal origin, and volunteers means those humans deliberately agreed to take part in the experiment, to eat GM soya, and give their faeces to the scholars, that is, the faeces were not collected in some public toilets and were not produced by anonymous people who had eaten food of unknown origin. In Russian, the best way to keep both words is to put it this way: "человеческие фекалии добровольцев" – 'human faeces from volunteers.'

Yellow Sky
  • 18,268
  • 39
  • 65
  • Thanks for your thoughts! For some reason "человеческие фекалии добровольцев" seems quite funny to me. It's as if volunteers could produce a variety of faeces, and on that particular occasion were asked to produce faeces of the human type. There are some things I cannot express that bother me in this combination. But I see that one of your native languages is Russian so I could be wrong on this count. Maybe it would be felicitous.. – CopperKettle Oct 04 '15 at 11:03
  • @CopperKettle - Don't forget, that is not the end of the sentence, the next clause explains what kind of volunteers they were and what there volunteering consisted in. – Yellow Sky Oct 04 '15 at 11:44
  • I wound up with this: "При анализе образцов человеческого кала, взятого у добровольцев с неповрежденными ЖКТ после употребления в пищу ГМ сои, внедренный ген обнаружен не был, что говорит о том, что внедренный ген обычно полностью разлагается в толстой кишке." -- basically "human faeces obtained from volunteers". – CopperKettle Oct 04 '15 at 11:46
  • 1
    @CopperKettle - Excellent, that was one of the variants I wanted to suggest, but you came up with it yourself. – Yellow Sky Oct 04 '15 at 12:17