Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

Dear Allegro, My comment was intended as a pleasantry. I'm facing almost total disagreement here. I didn't know what your responses would be beforehand, and I didn't know if they would be convincing or not (to me).
Perhaps the fact I am not swayed is due to the nature of linguistics itself, and Parole in particular. Language has a very personal aspect depending on how, where, and from whom we learn it. This may be a regional phenomenon. I don't know. I'm still thinking about it. I find the different usage of terminology to be interesting.
I certainly don't feel obliged to agree with your usage, but I respect it. Based on this input, I'll be more accommodating to my customer's concerns. Thank you again.

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

Thank you all very much. If we ever meet, I’ll owe you a beer.
I haven’t changed my mind, however. The "tion" or "ion" suffix. It's like instruct and instruction. The teacher instructs the class. She is responsible for the instruction of the class or even better yet for "instructing the class".
Same thing with "free and fair elections". For example, I would say "nothing should be done to inhibit the conduction of free and fair elections. I would never use “conduct” as a noun here.
For example, consider the "conduct of the orchestra". After the show, the orchestra went out together, got drunk and destroyed the town”. Conduction of the orchestra is another thing altogether
I haven't received a disagreeing opinion from any mother-tongue Americans yet so I'm still wondering if this is a UK English, American English phenomenon
As far as the dictionaries are concerned, they are not normative, they are ex post facto attempts to record language as it exists. In my opinion, they are failing here. In my research I found one that agrees with my definition (Wikipedia). I don't have a good unabridged dictionary here either. I grew up in Connecticut, that is how I was taught. You can't teach

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

(continued from below"

an old dog new tricks.
Even though I think I’m right and the world is wrong, what I probably should do is change the sentence using a gerund, i.e. “regarding the terms and conditions for conducting the clinical trial”.
Thank you very much again.

AllegroTrans Mar 13, 2020:

Asker Is this proofreading? Did a non-native English speaker translate this text from another language? If you are right and everyone else is wrong, why did you even bother to post this?

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

(continued from below"

an old dog new tricks.
Even though I think I’m right and the world is wrong, what I probably should do is change the sentence using a gerund, i.e. “regarding the terms and conditions for conducting the clinical trial”.
Thank you very much again.

Daryo Mar 13, 2020:

I don't have to "prove" anything anyone can check for themselves - take 5 -10 -20 samples from the two searches (discarding anything that doesn't look like a relevant source or could be expected to be a translation ) and do a quick scan through them.

Boris Shapiro Mar 13, 2020:

@Daryo I was hoping you could cite a few examples. Superficial googling yielded mostly Brazilian, Bosnian, Austrian etc websites/papers. The onus to prove the thousands of links are to 'perfectly good texts' is, after all, on you.

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

(continued from below"

an old dog new tricks.
Even though I think I’m right and the world is wrong, what I probably should do is change the sentence using a gerund, i.e. “regarding the terms and conditions for conducting the clinical trial”.
Thank you very much again.

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

Thank you all very much. If we ever meet, I’ll owe you a beer.
I haven’t changed my mind, however. The "tion" or "ion" suffix. It's like instruct and instruction. The teacher instructs the class. She is responsible for the instruction of the class or even better yet for "instructing the class".
Same thing with "free and fair elections". For example, I would say "nothing should be done to inhibit the conduction of free and fair elections. I would never use “conduct” as a noun here.
For example, consider the "conduct of the orchestra". After the show, the orchestra went out together, got drunk and destroyed the town”. Conduction of the orchestra is another thing altogether
I haven't received a disagreeing opinion from any mother-tongue Americans yet so I'm still wondering if this is a UK English, American English phenomenon
As far as the dictionaries are concerned, they are not normative, they are ex post facto attempts to record language as it exists. In my opinion, they are failing here. In my research I found one that agrees with my definition (Wikipedia). I don't have a good unabridged dictionary here either. I grew up in Connecticut, that is how I was taught. You can't teach

Daryo Mar 13, 2020:

Yes, I'm aware of the problems created by translations that are more or less replicating the terms or the specific structure / logic of the source language, but you can't dismiss "conduction of the clinical trial" on that kind of grounds - too many occurences in perfectly good texts.

just try

google.com/search?q=%22conduction+of+the+clinical+trial%22

and

google.com/search?q=%22conduct+of+the+clinical+trial%22

Boris Shapiro Mar 13, 2020:

Indeed There are cases where international bodies have a large contingent of non-native English speakers - say, a regional branch. These branches often publish substandard English documents. I have seen with my own eyes allegedly English documents by reputable international bodies that routinely feature very Russian-sounding phrases and terms (simply because they were produced by xUSSR parties), and quite numerous at that. Which, I hope you'll agree, still does not make them in any way normative.

Tina Vonhof (X) Mar 13, 2020:

@Jerold I am neither Irish nor UK but I agree with the replies given. Thesaurus just gives you possible synonyms which may or may not fit in the context, and your other source uses examples found online. But just because some people use the wrong term doesn't mean it is correct. As for your ear...enough said.

AllegroTrans Mar 13, 2020:

Jerold "I'm making the affirmative claim that the "conduction of the clinical trial" is a meaningful English statement superior to the "Conduct of the clinical trial"
Sorry but NO (forgive the shout). This is simply wrong. Your "ear" is badly letting you down.

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

I'm not really ignoring the evidence Tony, thank you. The evidence I see is not proof. I'm making the affirmative claim that the "conduction of the clinical trial" is a meaningful English statement superior to the "Conduct of the clinical trial" when the intended meaning is "how, in detail, the trial is carried out" based on my personal Parole (in the linguistic sense, also known as my "ear"). Dictionaries do not always grasp the subtlety of language and they copy each other. I do think they are deficient here. I find evidence contrary to your claim in many reputable sources available on the web, as well as the synonymous use of conduction in many thesauruses (ref. https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/conduction) or https://ludwig.guru/s/"conduction of the study".
So far, the preponderance of the replies on Proz disagreeing with my preference are Irish or UK. I personally do not disagree with you, it's my "ear" that does and my "ear" is different than yours. Either that or there is something in the water. :)

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 13, 2020:

I'm not really ignoring the evidence Tony, thank you. The evidence I see is not proof. I'm making the affirmative claim that the "conduction of the clinical trial" is a meaningful English statement superior to the "Conduct of the clinical trial" when the intended meaning is "how, in detail, the trial is carried out" based on my personal Parole (in the linguistic sense, also known as my "ear"). Dictionaries do not always grasp the subtlety of language and they copy each other. I do think they are deficient here. I find evidence contrary to your claim in many reputable sources available on the web, as well as the synonymous use of conduction in many thesauruses (ref. https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/conduction) or https://ludwig.guru/s/"conduction of the study".
So far, the preponderance of the replies on Proz disagreeing with my preference are Irish or UK. I personally do not disagree with you, it's my "ear" that does and my "ear" is different than yours. Either that or there is something in the water. :)

Boris Shapiro Mar 13, 2020:

@Daryo Could you, perhaps, post a few links that you think normative? So far as I can see, these 84 300 hits seem to be almost exclusively self-translated articles by non-native English speakers.

Daryo Mar 12, 2020:

Statistics .... "conduct of the clinical trial" EXACTLY THAT WORDING About 1,340,000 results
vs
"conduction of the clinical trial" EXACTLY THAT WORDING About 84,300 results

so with "about 84,300 ghits" the variant "conduction of the clinical trial" is unlikely to be a just a repeated aberration, but is definitely far less used than "conduct of the clinical trial".

Sometimes you find BOTH in the same text [texts that definitely sound like written by people who know what they are talking about, like the World Health Organisation or various EU agencies - NOT some MT rubbish that is polluting the Web], so there might be some "nuance of meaning". What it could be is not obvious from the few samples where it occurred.

BTW, a point of method: when you have nowadays a HUGE collection of real-life samples available on the Web, staying stuck in dictionaries seems a bit outdated as method ...

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 12, 2020:

I'm not really ignoring the evidence Tony, thank you. The evidence I see is not proof. I'm making the affirmative claim that the "conduction of the clinical trial" is a meaningful English statement superior to the "Conduct of the clinical trial" when the intended meaning is "how, in detail, the trial is carried out" based on my personal Parole (in the linguistic sense, also known as my "ear"). Dictionaries do not always grasp the subtlety of language and they copy each other. I do think they are deficient here. I find evidence contrary to your claim in many reputable sources available on the web, as well as the synonymous use of conduction in many thesauruses (ref. https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/conduction) or https://ludwig.guru/s/"conduction of the study".
So far, the preponderance of the replies on Proz disagreeing with my preference are Irish or UK. I personally do not disagree with you, it's my "ear" that does and my "ear" is different than yours. Either that or there is something in the water. :)

Tony M Mar 12, 2020:

@ Asker No, the dictionaries are fine; I'm afraid you are simply seeking to force it to mean what YOU think it should, flying in the face of all the evidence and the advice of several native speakers.
If we talk about a person, then 'conduct' can have this meaning of 'behaviour': 'up till now, his conduct had always been exemplary'
BUT where we refer to an inanimate object or even abstract concept, where the notion of 'behaviour' is clearly impossible, then we fall back on a slightly different nuance of meaning: 'the way something is conducted'.
If you specifically need to talk about 'the fact of conducting something', because 'conduction' is rare, if not unused, then in EN we can fall back on the gerund: "Conducting clinical trials is a necessary prerequisite to bringing a new treatment into use."

Jerold Stamp (asker) Mar 12, 2020:

Are the dictionaries deficient? Maybe I'm being arrogant, stubborn, or both, but I'm not impressed with the dictionaries. When we say "the conduction of free and fair elections" cannot we mean the details on how they are carried out or even the fact that they are being carried out at all, whereas when we say "the conduct of free and fair elections" aren't we are referring more exclusively to the fact that they are actually being carried out at all. Is there or is there not is a subtle difference between the two?
This Clinical Trial Agreement goes into detail on how the trial is managed. If you look online even, you will see many significant sources that use conduction in the same sense that I do.

Yvonne Gallagher Mar 12, 2020:

@ Mark it's a NOUN not a verb

Mark Robertson Mar 12, 2020:

@Jerold Conduct is a verb in this context, which means to organize and perform a particular activity. It is standard usage in both EN-GB and EN-US.

Conduction is nonsense in this context as it means the process by which heat or electricity goes through a substance

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/conduct