Research paper - translated plagiarism? I'm writing a research paper in my native language, Serbian, on a specific electrical engineering and applied mathematics topic. Moreover, there are two published papers in English that hold much of the information I need.

Now, the topic itself is quite new and is unknown in Serbia, and consequently at my university. My plan is to sum up the results of the two papers, further expand on the theory behind it (which is only arbitrarily mentioned in the English papers), and finally encapsulate the whole idea. 

So, strictly speaking, I won't be doing any original research, in terms of experiments or mathematical breakthroughs, but rather synopsize and provide a desired perspective on a modern topic that is novel to my national academic environment. 



Q: If I reference the two English papers and their authors at the end of the paper, do I commit plagiarism? 

For example, if I see a nice sentence in one of the papers, and I translate it into my paper, are the references at the end enough for crediting the author?

Finally, is using the pictures from the two papers (with referencing them naturally) accepted practice? Or do I need to get the authors' permission to use them? 



Furthermore, does my paper still hold some kind of value, even though it doesn't provide original results? At the very least, it introduces a new, and very interesting topic to my faculty, and is generally a field I'm interested in researching, and eventually achieving some real and relevant results.
Referencing the papers at the end is not sufficient.

Generally, the litmus test whether or not something is plagariasm is whether the reader is given an adequate impression of how much of the text is other peoples work. Readers don't always read entire papers, and in particular may not make it to the end.

In your case, I would suggest to state at the beginning what your two main sources are, and give some indication of how heavily you are drawing from them. Then, throughout the paper reference each bit you've taken from elsewhere by where it is coming from.