Comments on Is English translation of technical terms on-topic?
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Is English translation of technical terms on-topic?
Quite often, I find myself knowing the technical term of an electronic component in my native language, but not the proper English term. For example when translating a manual or other technical documentation to English, since these terms are far too technical to find in a dictionary.
In such situations I tend to do a literal translation, which can end up very strange and often comical "Engrish". (RL anecdote: all capacitors in our inventory system once ended up translated to "condensators", which would be a direct translation from Swedish "kondensator".)
Googling the translation can be hard and sometimes you end up with a "good enough" translation that can be understood in English, even though it isn't the correct term.
It would therefore be helpful to ask a native English EE what the correct English term is, so that I end up using the correct term.
Example question, this came up today:
What are these called in English?
(From https://sc04.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1pLUPguOSBuNjy0Fdq6zDnVXa9.jpg)
The translation I came up with is "cable canal" or alternatively "cable duct". No idea what is most correct.
Are these kind of questions on-topic? Or might people find them annoying since they are too simplistic?
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I don't really have an opinion on this as far as scope goes, but this seems like a type of question that can be answered far more quickly with a dictionary.
Hence, people might be tempted to vote such questions down because of a lack of effort on the part of the person asking the question. At a minimum, you'd need to pre-empt that by showing that answering the question isn't as simple as reaching for the nearest dictionary either online or in print, or at most doing a reverse image web search to identify similar items and derive the term for the item from there.
Taking your real-life example from your question, I plugged "kondensator" into the Swedish Wikipedia, and sure enough there it is. Next, I looked in the left-hand side bar where there's a long list of links to the same article in other languages, and again, sure enough, the "English" link takes me to the English article named capacitor. (That article also, as it happens, mentions right near the top that "[t]he capacitor was originally known as a condenser or condensator".)
No, Wikipedia isn't perfect, and you might want to cross-check with a more dedicated dictionary and/or thesaurus before relying on such a translation for anything important, but it seems unlikely to use a completely wrong term as the article title, and it's probably safer than just making a literal translation of the word itself without regards for the context in which it appears.
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