Croatian vocabulary of molecular and cell biology

Sa？etak The technical vocabulary of many areas is often developed independently of the rules of the Croatian language, especially in the case of young sciences that are developed in English. One such example is the vocabulary of molecular biology. The development of this research area in Croatia began in the 1960s at the University of Zagreb and the Institute Ru？er Bo？kovi？. In 1981 Molecular Biology study program started at the Department of Biology at the Faculty of Science, and in 1989 Divison of Molecular Biology at the same Department was founded. However, until recently there was no systematically elaborated development of professional vocabulary of this scientific area. Due to growing significance of the research results from molecular biology and genetics in the context of everyday life at the Department of Molecular Biology two projects were conducted. The first is a translation of the Dictionary of Molecular and Cell Biology that contains more than 12 000 entries, whose purpose is to make the professional vocabulary as result of cooperation between linguists and biologists. The second project –“Genetikon” – has been funded by the Croatian Science Foundation through the “Struna” project, and it covers genetic lexicon, enabling the most important concepts and systematically developed Croatian terminology to be gathered at one place. In this paper we give a short overview of the molecular biology vocabulary development with special emphasis on the six basic guidelines that we hope will contribute to the development of the technical vocabulary of genetics and cellular and molecular biology