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Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from?

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HwAoRrDk:

--- Quote from: vk6zgo on July 24, 2022, 01:22:32 am ---Strange translations are not confined to English/Chinese & vice versa, even related languages like French/ English & German/English have brought forth their share of "howlers".

The English translations of original French manuals I used to work with had some seriously inventive efforts which made them really hard to decipher, but the best was one my brother related to me:

"This equipment is designed to operate in the 3GHz 'group of musicians playing together' "!

--- End quote ---

Yes, you do have to be careful with retaining the correct context when translating, no matter the language. I once saw a French translation of some English source text that talked about delivery to customers, etc. and it was using the word "maritime". Now, my French may be very rusty, but even I knew that was the wrong kind of 'shipping'! :D I suggested they change it to "livraison".

tooki:

--- Quote from: vk6zgo on July 24, 2022, 01:22:32 am ---The German manuals offered their own challenges, often because the English translation was less complete than the original, so it became necessary to look up that manual & sort out from the original German, what was meant. (I am only an English speaker, but I always found written German easier to translate from a logical basis than French.)

One thing had me, though, with some equipment which showed a circular device on the schematic, labelled with the word "Drossel".
From where it lived, it should be an inductor, but no indication of the winding configuration was shown.
Googling, it came up with "Throttle", or "thrush" ( the bird).

Surely, German would be "Induktor" if that is what it was?

Anyhow, it seems a more obscure translation is "choke", so it was an inductor, after all!

Strangely, I had never seen anything but the official term used in other German equipment, & thought that to all intents & purposes, "choke" was as archaic in German as in English.

--- End quote ---
German electronics terminology tends to be a bit closer to archaic English electronics terminology, when they differ. (For example, “Kondensator”, cognate to the archaic English “condenser” for capacitors.)

“Drossel” remains the contemporary equivalent of “choke”, which is not an archaic term in English, either: chokes are a subset of inductors. (For example, in the term “common mode choke”, or “Gleichtaktdrossel” in German.) Not sure where you got the idea that this was archaic in either language.

FWIW, there is no German word “Induktor”. The word for an inductor is “Induktivität”, or colloquially simply a “Spule”, which simply means “coil”.

tooki:

--- Quote from: HwAoRrDk on July 24, 2022, 10:24:07 am ---
--- Quote from: vk6zgo on July 24, 2022, 01:22:32 am ---Strange translations are not confined to English/Chinese & vice versa, even related languages like French/ English & German/English have brought forth their share of "howlers".

The English translations of original French manuals I used to work with had some seriously inventive efforts which made them really hard to decipher, but the best was one my brother related to me:

"This equipment is designed to operate in the 3GHz 'group of musicians playing together' "!

--- End quote ---

Yes, you do have to be careful with retaining the correct context when translating, no matter the language. I once saw a French translation of some English source text that talked about delivery to customers, etc. and it was using the word "maritime". Now, my French may be very rusty, but even I knew that was the wrong kind of 'shipping'! :D I suggested they change it to "livraison".

--- End quote ---
The worst “translation” (it being so bad as to barely warrant the word) was in the German subtitles of the Swiss release prints* of the American 1994 movie “Kids”. One of the awful kids in the movie was telling another awful kid friend that while at the amusement park, he’d bought his girlfriend a snack.

Awful kid: “I got her a corn dog.”

The translator had apparently never heard of a corn dog, and rather than asking a fellow translator or American friend, grabbed their bilingual dictionary (where it’s important to note that British usage is generally given priority) and looked up “corn” and “dog”, and came up with:
“Ich habe sie zu einem Getreidehund eingeladen.” — “I invited her for a grain canine.” (Because “corn” in British English means grains/cereals, and not maize specifically as it does in USA.)  :palm: :palm:  :palm: :palm:

The type of snack was irrelevant, as it did not recur in the story at all. It could have been replaced with anything else — a hot dog, a burger, some pizza, or just “a snack” — but no such sensible substitution took place.


*Swiss film prints had both German and French subtitles at the same time, German in plain text and French in italics. They didn’t use the same prints as Germany and France.

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: tooki on July 24, 2022, 05:50:03 pm ---
--- Quote from: vk6zgo on July 24, 2022, 01:22:32 am ---The German manuals offered their own challenges, often because the English translation was less complete than the original, so it became necessary to look up that manual & sort out from the original German, what was meant. (I am only an English speaker, but I always found written German easier to translate from a logical basis than French.)

One thing had me, though, with some equipment which showed a circular device on the schematic, labelled with the word "Drossel".
From where it lived, it should be an inductor, but no indication of the winding configuration was shown.
Googling, it came up with "Throttle", or "thrush" ( the bird).

Surely, German would be "Induktor" if that is what it was?

Anyhow, it seems a more obscure translation is "choke", so it was an inductor, after all!

Strangely, I had never seen anything but the official term used in other German equipment, & thought that to all intents & purposes, "choke" was as archaic in German as in English.

--- End quote ---
German electronics terminology tends to be a bit closer to archaic English electronics terminology, when they differ. (For example, “Kondensator”, cognate to the archaic English “condenser” for capacitors.)

“Drossel” remains the contemporary equivalent of “choke”, which is not an archaic term in English, either: chokes are a subset of inductors. (For example, in the term “common mode choke”, or “Gleichtaktdrossel” in German.) Not sure where you got the idea that this was archaic in either language.

FWIW, there is no German word “Induktor”. The word for an inductor is “Induktivität”, or colloquially simply a “Spule”, which simply means “coil”.

--- End quote ---

Take it up with R&S & Siemens, who used "Induktor" interchangeably with “Induktivität” on the schematics in their workshop manuals back in the day!
They didn't use "Drossel", or I would have been used to it.

Of course, they didn't just draw circles with lines leading in & out, either.

JohanH:

--- Quote from: tooki on July 24, 2022, 05:50:03 pm ---German electronics terminology tends to be a bit closer to archaic English electronics terminology, when they differ. (For example, “Kondensator”, cognate to the archaic English “condenser” for capacitors.)

“Drossel” remains the contemporary equivalent of “choke”, which is not an archaic term in English, either: chokes are a subset of inductors. (For example, in the term “common mode choke”, or “Gleichtaktdrossel” in German.) Not sure where you got the idea that this was archaic in either language.

FWIW, there is no German word “Induktor”. The word for an inductor is “Induktivität”, or colloquially simply a “Spule”, which simply means “coil”.

--- End quote ---

This has been mentioned before in the forum, that a majority of European languages use cognates of the word condensor, instead of capacitor.

In Swedish, there is drossel and spole as in German, but we also use induktor nowadays. However, there is no good short term in Swedish for "common mode", which is a pity. There is "gemensam mod", but it is rarely used, except in some technical manuals. In a text you could write it as "drossel för gemensam spänning" (choke for common voltage) or some such. E.g. in Finnish it's easier, because they often use more or less native words to construct such terms, e.g. a common mode choke I believe would be "yhteismuotoinen kuristin".


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