Vordach

German: Vordach

I don't know whether I've led a sheltered life, but somehow the German word for canopy never impinged on my consciousness until this year, and I always want to translate it as "pre-roof", which obviously makes no sense whatsoever.

Fadenzugkontakt

German: Fadenzugkontakt

Sometimes the online dictionaries - and essentially everything else online - just don't cover something. Then, stymied, you go fix lunch and install Word on your son's new laptop, and come back and sit down to the clear realization that you already knew this one. It just needed a little time to gestate.

Tripwire. (Langenscheidt confirms, but you have to know what you're searching for first.)

Lichtraum

German: Lichtraum

Kinetic envelope, as of a train or, oh, say, a roller coaster. It's kind of fun translating the testing documentation for a roller coaster. I should ride on that roller coaster - except I really loathe roller coasters.

Vrac

French: Vrac

Bulk, at least in pharmaceuticals. It's not often I see a truly new simple word in French.

Verpflichtung

German: Verpflichtung

Verpflichtung covers the English senses of obligation (something externally imposed) and commitment (something internally resolved). I had never really thought about it, but I'm retranslating a Website at the moment - changes have been made, but we have the translation of the old text - and realized that commitment is a pretty good translation for Verpflichtung in a corporate mission statement.

Juego ocasional

Spanish: juego ocasional

Game of chance. That one almost got me.

Alap

Hungarian: alap

"Alap" is a word I always thought was just "base" or "basis" - but it turns out that it also means fund. Seriously! But then I thought about it: "fund" also means "basis" (foundation). How cool is that? Just another Latin obscurity.

So while translating a document about the European Regional Development Fund, I ran across the European Union's legal text site. Very useful!

Nut und Feder

German: Nut und Feder

Literally, "groove and spring", but actually tongue and groove.

Ringschäle

German: Ringschäle

Shake (a crack that follows the curve of the rings in lumber)

I found a handy-dandy timber engineering dictionary. Very useful!

Brummspannung

German: Brummspannung

Ripple voltage. I just like the word.

Lamellenkamm

German: Lamellenkamm

Today I have learned a new thing: that you can straighten the fins on a condenser unit, using a condenser fin comb, or "Lamellenkamm". And it's nice to find a mysterious-looking fanlike thing in a product list in Germany, then find a reassuringly English-speaking guy showing me how to use one.

The word Lamellen is actually one of those that's tricky to translate, as "lamellae" is always waiting there to clobber any more sensible alternative that might occur to you.

Now pardon me while I go buy a condenser fin comb, because I have some condenser fins that could use one, actually.

Testa pozzo

Italian: testa pozzo

Wellhead. For drilling. Italian always lulls you into thinking you know what it's talking about, then strangely persists in being a different language from Spanish and French.

Band

German: Band

German words sometimes end up with a whole lot of English "equivalents". Today's is Band, which can mean, well, "band", but also "volume (of a book)" or, in my special case today, "door or gate hinge". No, really.

I got all the way through to the drawing explanations in a patent about gate hinges today before I thought, you know, translating this as "band" just isn't all that felicitous.

It's amazing I get any repeat business at all. Fortunately I usually twig to this stuff before delivering.

Recherche

French: recherche

You'd think it would be research - and normally you'd be right! But in mining, it's prospecting. Fortunately, this shoe dropped before I returned the translation.

a.i.

French (Congolese): a.i.

Latin ad interim, that is "Acting" or "Interim", applied to a title. In this case, a contract for a Congolese mining company with Administrateur Directeur Général a.i. - Acting General Managing Director. This might be Belgian French, but it's certainly in use in the Congo.

Verschmächtigt

German: verschmächtigt

Atrophied. The folks at LEO are full of scorn for such unprofessional slang and cast aspersions at Austrian German and all the doctors who use it in their records, but my instance is from Munich.

Betreffniss

Swiss German: Betreffniss

Oy. Banking in Swiss. "Allotment" or "share". Some of the alternative dictionaries (dict.cc for this one) do a better job with Schwyzerdütsch than my old standby LEO.

Kommutierungseinbruch

German: Kommutierungseinbruch

Commutation notch.

The DKE has a lovely, lovely online dictionary for IEV electrical terminology. These are the things that make German translation so much easier than it used to be.

Blindstrom

German: Blindstrom

Reactive current. But I want to type "dummy current" every time, even though it doesn't mean anything.

Dahlanderschaltung

German: Dahlanderschaltung

In an AC motor, a "Dahlander circuit" can be used to alter the number of poles in the drive circuit in order to double its speed. It's apparently used in HVAC systems, which is where I've encountered it. [wikipedia.de]

The full translation is probably best rendered as "Dahlander pole-changing circuit" (e.g. here), but in different circumstances I could see either "Dahlander pole changing" or "Dahlander circuit".

Legitimiert

German: legitimiert

Authorized.

It's unusual to see a Latin faux ami in German...

DM

Spanish medical abbreviation: DM

My guess (this is a case history for a cardiac patient): Diabetes mellitus. Meaning it's the same in English, of course. Sheesh.

Dolor

Spanish: dolor

Pain, of course. Like the pain of trying to Google a phrase in Spanish about pain - and getting back every freaking lorem ipsum page on the planet.

(The answer, of course, is a search string of the form: "DM dolor -lorem -amet". I still don't know what "DM" abbreviates, though. It's a mystery.)

Schnelldruckklemmen

German: Schnelldruckklemmen

Quick-release terminals. I love the counterintuitive ones.

ICC (insuficiencia cardiaca congestiva)

Spanish medical acronyms (like French ones) are all totally different from the English; German acronyms tend to be more similar. It makes medical translation exciting though.

Spanish: ICC = insuficiencia cardiaca congestiva = congestive heart failure (more or less)

Anyway, I got this one from the Spanish/English glossary [pdf] of the California Department of Social Services. Thanks, California!

Rechnernetz

German: Rechnernetz, contrast with Netzwerk.

In German technical documentation, Netz typically means a power mains/grid (depending on which side of the Atlantic you're writing for) - or more abstractly, "power". Netzwerk means "network". Where it gets slippery is Rechnernetz vs. Rechnernetzwerk.

So: Rechnernetz = computer power or computer power grid, perhaps.

The context in this case is a test bench that has separate power to the computer (for test data) and the bench itself - the emergency stop shuts off the bench, but not the computer, so you don't lose data. I was about 2000 words in before I realized that we weren't talking about the computer network - of which there is also one. Built-in hub, even.

Terzband

German: Terzband

A Terz is a third-octave; a terz guitar is one tuned a third-octave higher than normal. (This may also be "tierce".) In Germany, third-octaves are used for noise standards, so Terzband is "third octave band".

Hilfswiderklage

German: Hilfswiderklage

Subsidiary counterclaim [e.g.]. I really kind of need a list of the different instruments of legal action in the different languages I work with.

Point d'étape

French: point d'étape

Progress report or interim report.

One of the differences I see between French and German translation is that it seems that French is much more fluid in the number of alternate English translations a given French phrase can have. Don't get me wrong, German has some of that - but so very often there's a really clear forerunner, so to speak.

The situation's even worse in Hungarian. Those Hungarians have vocabulary all over the map.

TnT

Spanish, English: TnT

Medical abbreviations are relatively easy to track down in German (thanks to Beckers), but in Spanish it's a lot harder.

TnT is troponine T (e.g. [here] at Scripps [cardiac markers]), but it's the first I'd hit it, and the letters "tnt" aren't all that Googlable. Finally found it in Spanish here, and that page is pretty rich in useful cardiac-related Spanish terminology.

My work would probably be a lot easier if I invested just a little money into some reasonable dictionaries - but they're so darned heavy.

Batterie de résistances

French: batterie de résistances

Surprisingly, this is simply a term for "resistor". My context today is a call for offers for an electrical test bench; I'm learning a lot about French electrical terminology. (No time like the present!)

Good FR>EN technical reference: Parks Canada.

What, another blog?!?

Yeah, yeah. I've been posting the occasional vocabulary post to the Xlat project blog, but you know? It's just not really germane over there. So welcome to blog #15, my new "terminology research" blog.