O NIEKTORÝCH LINGVISTICKÝCH PROBLÉMOCH V TEÓRII VEREJNEJ SPRÁVY

A clear language is necessary and ultimate precondition for proper understanding of professional texts – however, there are many terms used non-systematically in the Slovak academic literature. Our article deals with problems whentranslating key public administration terms – governance, government, public admnistration and administration. We suggest that the meta-term today is governance, rather difficult to translate properly into the Slovak language – and we ask all the authors to use its possible translations only if this meta-level is discussed. The authors also document the second dimension of translation problems – many existing texts in English do not use core terms properly – one such example is the publicationEuropean Principles for Public Administration – in reality the text deals only with administrative law principles. To prevent problems with translating of terms and different sources we suggest that the “contextual” approach shall be used – first the authors of translations shoud read the text carefully for its contents and only afterwards decide how to translate its core terms.