Where does all the weird Chinese component terminology come from?

[HwAoRrDk]

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' "!

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'! I suggested they change it to "livraison".

[tooki]

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.

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]

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' "!

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'! I suggested they change it to "livraison".

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.)   

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]

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.

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”.

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]

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”.

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".

[retiredfeline]

]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.)

Japanese also uses old terminology for capacitors: コンデンサ (kondensa)

[westfw]

Hey @niconiconi!
Thank you for your excellent and informative insights on this stuff!

[Cubdriver]

About 30 years ago I was working for the US division of a company based in Liechtenstein that made instruments used in the electron microscopy field.  The manuals for the instruments would initially be published in German, then later in English.  One of the new instruments that came out while I worked there was an ion milling machine, used to thin inorganic samples for transmission electron microscopy.  As was the norm, we began to get the instruments but a year or so later still had no English literature or manual for them, so we attempted to translate what they supplied in German using an early translation program called Germassist (IIRC) - this was in about 1993, give or take.  One of the substances listed as suitable for processing in the machine was translated from German to "half band leader" in English.  We puzzled over the possible meaning of this one for a few days, then I think finally gave up and asked one of the guys back at the factory who could speak English what in the world it meant.  Once we learned, it made perfect sense, and gave us a good laugh.

The German term that the program had translated to "half band leader" was "semiconductor"   

-Pat

[niconiconi]

The German term that the program had translated to "half band leader" was "semiconductor"   

Someone just made this joke days ago. 

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/bad-electronics-jokes/msg4296886/#msg4296886

[JohanH]

The German term that the program had translated to "half band leader" was "semiconductor"   

-Pat

  That's funny. They could even have corrected it to "deputy band leader/conductor". I think I'm going to introduce the term "semiconductor" in musical circles...

But jokes are rarely understood between different faculties. A long time ago I joked something about programming and it turned out the C# programmers had no idea about the reference from musical notation to the name of the C# programming language.

[thm_w]

Recent one from Reps: https://youtu.be/uiCwm1dTo-o?t=1350
"Steam short"

[gnuarm]

So, I'm a bit lost from the original post.  What exactly does "brick nogging" mean?  Is it just any SMD connector? 

I was thinking of getting my prototypes from LCSC, but they don't have very many of the parts I need.  Their web site still does a crappy job of helping you sort through their parts inventory.  You can't even select parts that are in stock or at least orderable with a backlog.

Their PCB prices are amazingly low.  I'm thinking of having them fab my test fixture PCBs.  But I don't have a lot of need for brick nogging connectors... I think.   

[TimFox]

Going far back in this thread:

Quite interesting, I didn't know there was already a vacuum tube device called the "transitrons",

Actually, the "transitron" is a circuit using a normal vacuum-tube pentode in a non-standard bias state (screen positive with respect to plate) to obtain a negative AC resistance, suitable for use as an oscillator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transitron_oscillator_circuit.svg
It replaced the "dynatron", with a tetrode, obtaining negative resistance due to secondary emission from the plate (a less reliable circuit).
Later, a transistor manufacturer named itself "Transitron".

[eti]

They don’t give a monkeys armpit about accurate information, marketing or quality - all they care about is shifting shiploads of SKU. I find it ironic how many Chinese companies blatantly rip off western quality designs, but then have the GALL to sand off IC numbers!

[adeuring]

Here is a sentence from the English manual of an alarm system that was probably originally written in German:
(https://mobil.abus.com/Privat/Alarmsysteme/Terxon-Draht-System/Zentrale-Alarmierung/Zentrale/Terxon-SX-Alarmzentrale ):

"Define entry delay time 25.40 mm seconds." (page 136 in the linked PDF file)

IMHO, this tops the really interesting observations from vk6zgo about English manuals from German vendors. The German text gives a clue:

"Legen Sie die Eingangsverzögerungszeit 1 in Sekunden fest." (page 66)

If "25.4mm" is replaced with "in", the English sentence majes more sense: "Define entry delay time in seconds". But how on earth could it happen  that "in" was translated as "25.4 mm"? Sure, one inch equals 25.4 mm. But the assumption that the letters "in" in the German text could be an acronym for "inch" is just insane:

• The German word for "inch" is "Zoll". While Germans like to adopt English words, "inch" is, to the best of my knowledge (German is my native language), not among those "adopted" words.
• If I replace "in" with "Zoll" in the German text ("Legen Sie die Eingangsverzögerungszeit 1 Zoll in Sekunden fest.") reading the sentence leads to the same mental parsing error as reading the English translation.
• It is very uncommon in German to use imperial units. How could the translator – be it a human or a translation program – get the idea that a German text would specify a value in inch and then translate that value into a metric one for a language where imperial units are more common?

And this is not the only error in this manual. Some texts in the grey boxes of the drawings on pages 91 (English manual) and 15 (German manual) are cut off, for example. In this case, the English drawing is slightly more informative than the German.

[TimFox]

Here is a sentence from the English manual of an alarm system that was probably originally written in German:
(https://mobil.abus.com/Privat/Alarmsysteme/Terxon-Draht-System/Zentrale-Alarmierung/Zentrale/Terxon-SX-Alarmzentrale ):

"Define entry delay time 25.40 mm seconds." (page 136 in the linked PDF file)

IMHO, this tops the really interesting observations from vk6zgo about English manuals from German vendors. The German text gives a clue:

"Legen Sie die Eingangsverzögerungszeit 1 in Sekunden fest." (page 66)

If "25.4mm" is replaced with "in", the English sentence majes more sense: "Define entry delay time in seconds". But how on earth could it happen  that "in" was translated as "25.4 mm"? Sure, one inch equals 25.4 mm. But the assumption that the letters "in" in the German text could be an acronym for "inch" is just insane:

• The German word for "inch" is "Zoll". While Germans like to adopt English words, "inch" is, to the best of my knowledge (German is my native language), not among those "adopted" words.
• If I replace "in" with "Zoll" in the German text ("Legen Sie die Eingangsverzögerungszeit 1 Zoll in Sekunden fest.") reading the sentence leads to the same mental parsing error as reading the English translation.
• It is very uncommon in German to use imperial units. How could the translator – be it a human or a translation program – get the idea that a German text would specify a value in inch and then translate that value into a metric one for a language where imperial units are more common?

And this is not the only error in this manual. Some texts in the grey boxes of the drawings on pages 91 (English manual) and 15 (German manual) are cut off, for example. In this case, the English drawing is slightly more informative than the German.

Machine translation!  In US "customary units", the abbreviation for "inch" is "in", and "foot" is "ft".

[adeuring]

Machine translation!  In US "customary units", the abbreviation for "inch" is "in", and "foot" is "ft".

Yeah, it could be a machine error. But then it seems that this machine has no clue about abbreviations that are common in a German text and simply assumes that any English abbreviation can easily occur there…

[TimFox]

Clueless machinery is a world-wide problem.

On the other hand, when I studied German at age 16, I was told that German university students would read Immanuel Kant's works in standard English translations, which was easier to understand.

[coppice]

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

In the 70s, ST's data sheets (Thomson in those days) were often hilariously mistranslated into English.

[Bud]

There was something weird in all German documentation that I came across several years back which was either written or translated by German tech staff. I can't explain, but you have that "..not sure what is going on... " feeling as you read it. They have their style ,so to speak, writing technical documentation, which did not flow smooth with me. It was noticably different from north american technical documentation style that we were used to. Not saying here it was bad, it was just different.

[gnuarm]

It's not often you find good documentation of any sort.  It's hard to write good documentation.  Try it sometime.  It's more work than engineering, for sure.

[TimFox]

Literal translation does not give an idiomatic translation.
Or, as the Italian saying goes,
traduttore, traditore.

[amyk]

I remember seeing in the catalog of a connector manufacturer, sections named "hermaphrodite", "lesbian", and "gay".

[Bud]

Literal translation does not give an idiomatic translation.
Or, as the Italian saying goes,
traduttore, traditore.

It was not about gramma or spelling, it was about the workflow of information in the manual.

[Bud]

It's not often you find good documentation of any sort.  It's hard to write good documentation.  Try it sometime.  It's more work than engineering, for sure.

Writing technical documentation is part of my daily job.
Not all engineers want to do it, for sure.