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.

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.