Nutzen

German: Nutzen

One of those tricky words.  Normally - by far, "nutzen" means "use" and "Nutzen" means "benefits" - but in printing of cardboard where multiple blanks will be punched out of a large sheet after printing, "Nutzen" are "blanks".

It took me a really long time to figure that one out, too.

c.s.

Spanish: c.s. (in pharmaceutical documentation)

This is an abbreviation for cantidad suficiente, a "sufficient quantity" of an excipient to make up a given volume.  In English, of course, we use Latin, so q.s. is the corresponding abbreviation.

This and more are waiting for you at the utterly tremendous Tremedica glossary of signs and symbols used in Spanish medicine.  I wish I'd found this glossary years ago.

Löschen

German: Löschen (von Fracht)

Today I learned that "Löschen" doesn't always mean deletion or putting out a fire.  For some reason, it also means to unload freight.  I mean, come on, how does that make sense?

Languages are cool.

Grüner Star, grauer Star

German: grüner Star, grauer Star

This blew my mind.  Grüner Star is glaucoma, grauer Star is cataracts.  Why?  I have no idea!  Is glaucoma green?  According to this history of ophthalmology ... maybe.

Hemmhof

German: Hemmhof

Like many fields where basic research was done in different countries before science became an international effort, microbiology has some unexpectedly foreign-seeming terminology in German vs. English.  Zone of inhibition would nowadays probably be called an Inhibitionszone - but back in the day, they thought nothing of just calling it a nice German Hemmhof.

Here's a fantastic glossary of microbiological terminology for your delectation.

Leuchtdichte

German: Leuchtdichte


I always want to translate this "light density", but of course it is luminance.  Fortunately, every time I have to translate things about lighting, I always have a good TM.  But for this last one, I ran across a great lighting technology dictionary.

Sicherheitsabfrage

German: Sicherheitsabfrage

I've been flummoxed by this for years, and now I feel stupid: confirmation prompt is a much, much better translation than the stupid "safety query" or "security query" I've been defaulting to.

gekröpft

German: gekröpft (of a chain link)

Offset link, apparently.  A "gekröpftes Glied" is a half-link used to get the length of a roller chain (like a bicycle chain) right. Source: http://www.fks-gmbh.de/katalog/fks_katalog.pdf.

vehiculo

Spanish: vehiculo


In medical terminology, the vehicle of a medication is the inert substance in which the active ingredient is suspended or dissolved, and is usually called an excipient nowadays.  (Older texts may still use "vehicle".)

Fegedampf

German: Fegedampf

Also Brüden - both, according to the glossary my current end customer has supplied, are "flash steam", the steam that exhausts from a system under pressure.

Bündnerfleisch

Swiss German: Bündnerfleisch

I was utterly delighted to run across the word Bündnerfleisch today in the company history of Multi-Contact I'm translating.  It's a uniquely Baseler type of deli meat, a spiced dried beef, but its chief claim to recent global fame is this absolutely charming attack of laughter year before last on the part of Switzerland's finance minister Hans-Rudolf Merz, trying to read some Euroswiss import/export regulations to Parliament and breaking down entirely when it mentioned the meat in question.

TIBCO

I hate to violate the template like this, but here are some links to what TIBCO is about.  I'll clean up this post later with a specific word.

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuxedo_(software)
• http://www.greenhat.com/test_tibco.html
• http://www.itko.com/solutions/tibco.jsp

Rüsselmodus

German: Rüsselmodus

Answer: I still don't know. It's used in the context of a wafer inspection machine of some sort, but rüsseln isn't actually standard German. In Austria, it means "to sleep", and in Switzerland it means "to complain repetitively", so I just fudged and used complaint mode. Which is probably wrong.

There's some interesting discussion from Switzerland here.

Update 29 May 2012:
Or here, where a horse enters "Rüsselmodus", apparently complaining a lot and apparently in Switzerland, because a Google search on "Rüsselmodus" also turns up a fossil link to a now-defunct forum posting that contrasts "Aufrecht-Modus" with "Rüssel-Modus" (also on a horse forum, oddly enough), and that horse must have been Austrian, since "upright" contrasts well with "sleeping" but not so felicitously with "complaining".

Of course, by far the most common returns for the word are now this post and all the other posts on this blog that show it in the sidebar.

Schräglicht

German: Schräglicht

Oblique light, which is actually obvious. For lots of words along those lines, here's a glossary of optical microscopy.