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 think we should definitely allow technical terms translations, because it's really difficult to find reliable sources online. And the translation process can be tricky, since the translated term can be context sensitive. Some examples in Italian:
array antennas --> antenne a schiera ("schiera" here translates "array") and is a well-established term in telecom engineering (there is no alternative "antenne ad array" terminology).
but
array variable --> variabile di tipo array or simply array (no sane Italian programmer would call them "variabili a schiera").
But there are also problems with false friends and (almost) homophones/homographs. As an example:
silicon --> silicio
silicone --> silicone
You can't imagine how many American TV shows were dubbed in Italian with those two terms swapped. In particular I always laugh my pants off when I hear someone talking about "chip di silicone" ("silicone chips"). Strangely enough, I never heard someone making the opposite mistake and talking about some model having silicon breast implants. :-)
I think the first time I heard this was in a Star Trek episode where Mr.Spock talked about some "silicon-eating rock-burrowing creatures" and that was translated as "silicone-eating" in the dubbing.
Sometimes this happens even in more "serious" programs, like news reports, when not done by journalists with some scientific background. I vaguely remember some journalist talking not long ago about the need to asses the presence of useful minerals like silicone in mars rocks for future colonies to be able to build infrastructures with local materials.
I think such questions are OK as long as they are EE-specific. General purpose dictionaries often do a poor job with specialized technical terms, especially when they are the same or similar as regular words in either language. There can also be nuances how EE-specific terms are used in different circumstances and contexts.
As long as the translation benefits from EE knowledge or experience, I'd welcome such questions.
The parent company of the local US company I work for is Swedish, so I've had to read my share of Swinglish descriptions. While still way better than most Chinglish, I'd be happy to help avoid such things.
By the way, I'd call the thing in your picture a cable tray.
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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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