ÜWM

German: ÜWM

ÜWM is an abbreviation for Überwurfmutter - or union connection, the cap-shaped nut on the end of flexible plumbing hoses (at least in the States, the hose to your toilet tank has one, for example).

CTU

Italian: CTU

This was a weird one, in a court brief. Turns out it stands for consulente tecnico d'ufficio, which is expert witness.

Tökön szúrom magam

Hungarian: tökön szúrom magam

Oh, Hungary. Your earthy terminology is so evocative. In English, this is I'll stab myself in the groin. Not something one normally expects to see in an employee survey, but hey.

Terméskötődés or just kötődés

Hungarian: (termés)kötődés

I do have the feeling I'm going to be posting more than just two agronomy terms during the course of this job, but this one was a doozy. It took me at least two hours to run it to ground. And it's another phenological term, this time for cherries (and other fruit).  Kötődés without the context is just "binding", which was pretty useless - and worse, misleading, because for quite some time I thought it must mean a task carried out by the farmer, binding the buds or something. (OK, so, I'm not a cherry farmer, all right?)

Anyway, it turns out to be fruit set, which is the point where the ovaries of the blossoms start to swell to form fruit. This kind of thing is why I love translation. Who would have thought of either of these terms, let alone both of them at once?

Sorzárodás

Hungarian: sorzárodás

Agronomy is always a terminology-intensive subject matter, and it didn't help that my source document had misspelled this as sozárodás, but I finally managed to narrow it down to a stage in the life of potato plants. Life stages of plants, by the way, are a matter of phenology. Just so you know

Anyway, this turns out to be surprisingly simple to translate: row closure. Amazing. Exactly what it says. It's the point when the leaves of the plants cover the ground between them. After row closure, if you apply a pesticide, it's not going to make it to the soil.

German: Reihenschluss. It's always so nice when words say what they mean.

Vorpromesse

German: Vorpromesse

Actually, I'm still not 100% sure how to translate this one, but it's something along the lines of a preliminary promissory note: documentation of a commitment on the part of a bank to make a certain loan contingent on the awarding of a contract.

Jogosult és kötelezett

Hungarian: jogosult and kötelezett

In Hungarian, legal relationships are very often boiled down to their minimum (from the anglophonic perspective) - so you very often see jogosult rendered as obligor and kötelezett as the obligee, that is, the parties who are granted a benefit and an obligation by a contract, respectively. And technically, these are correct, but of course, in the English world we don't ever actually use those terms.

Instead, we normally use more restrictive terms that are specific to the actual relationship being codified in the contract: so a jogosult ends up being the lender, and the kötelezett the borrower, for instance. But Hungarian uses these terms for lots of different kinds of contract, like employer/employee.

I love this kind of detail. I got this nice summary from this cool blog here on HU/EN legal translation.

Sprungleiste

German: Sprungleiste

In programming, a Sprungleiste is a jump table. I guess that's not all that mind-blowing; I just found it somehow charming.

Impressum

German: Impressum

German law requires any commercial website doing business in Germany to feature an "Impressum" detailing the legal information of the business sponsoring the website. In German, "Impressum" is a general term for publications that in English has no good translation. For a periodical, we call it a "masthead", and for a book it's an "imprint".

Plenty of people will tell you that "imprint" is the appropriate term for a website as well - but in this, as in so many cases, plenty of people are wrong. The best translation I've come across is "Legal Notice", but depending on the tone of the site and the design of the Impressum you can get away with "About us", "Contact information" or even "Impressum" if you want to get funky about it.

Actually, I'm seriously considering adding an Impressum to my own site, just to be contrary.

Strömungsabriss

German: Strömungsabriss

Some technical terms are really, really hard to find. Flow separation, apparently.

bis, ter, quater, quinquies

Italian: bis, ter, quater, quinquies

Italian legal documents use a lot of Latin, but I've seen this numbering on occasion in German and French as well. Essentially, these are 'b', 'c', 'd', and 'e' - or they could just as well be rendered 'a', 'b', 'c', and 'd', since they start with bis, which is 2.

I've read that they're often used as a subnumbering scheme in situations (such as figures, or documents submitted in evidence) when there is already numbering and new items need to be inserted between two existing numbers. For example, we have Figure 2 and Figure 3, and we insert a figure between them - in this case, this system would call it Figure 2bis.

I've translated this as e.g. 2a, and so far nobody's complained.

k.m.n.

Hungarian: k.m.n.

Medical abbreviations are always a load of fun; it's difficult to get a good list (there's a great Spanish list, but it's now no longer free).  So as I find them in various translations, I've been trying to run them down more consistently. In Hungarian diagnoses, then, k.m.n. stands for külön megnevezés nélkül, which translates as not otherwise specified, sometimes itself abbreviated to n.o.s. or NOS. Actually, that's common in the various nomenclatures, like the DSM. And it's also used as n.o.s. in the UN Numbers for chemicals.

Aha, here's actually a great list of magyar orvosi rövidítések  - oh, wait, that actually seems to be Hungarian translates of English abbreviations.  This one's more Hungarian.

Cara sencilla/cara doble

Spanish: cara sencilla and cara doble

Single-face and double-face?  What?  But in telecommunications, this is how we talk about simplex and duplex transmissions.