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French to English translations [PRO] Tech/Engineering - Construction / Civil Engineering / Asbestos report - locations from which samples were taken for testing
French term or phrase:ventilation soufflage
This is given as a location from which a sample was taken for testing in an asbestos survey. Can anyone suggest an English translation? My best guess would be "ventilation blast/blowing room" but I'm not a technical translator (the document is mostly legal but a small number of technical terms are creating a lot of confusion for me!).
Well yes, I fear you are rather missing my point too! I don't have the appropriate background and so was not in the position to make the decisions you did, decisions which you yourself recognise as being dependent on having your knowledge and background. And I didn't post my guess as a plausible suggestion. It was more to illustrate that with access only to standard dictionaries and some idea of what sounds vaguely plausible in English to my non-technical ears, the best I can do is cobble together something with a hopefully similar meaning but a very low likelihood of accuracy. I won't post a guess again. It has wasted a huge amount of time here and seems to have led to inaccurate assumptions being made about my abilities. Although I do genuinely appreciate your actual help. Thank you.
Incidentally, I'd like to work with a technical translator in this kind of scenario in the future but it is usually impossible as clients have sign contracts saying you won't do this. This client did not but given the tight deadline and my lack of experience in making such arrangements it didn't look like a realistic option here. Thankfully for all involved, the proofreader has technical help.
There is no harm in posting your "guess", which I accept as such; it is indeed essential, so potential answerers can grasp just what an asker has or has not understood in the source term.
The purpose of my constructive feedback was simply to illustrate to you how your guess was less than plausible, given the syntax of the original; had your "guess" been based on normal word-order inversion, it would have been closer to the mark. Just to make it clear: one would hardly need a 'room' for the purposes of 'ventilating' a 'blast' — the blast will exist, and needs 'venting' (in EN, a rather different concept from 'ventilation') — and the 'ventilation' is thus the facility that provides this venting; one may imagine some kind of duct, chimney, or indeed simply orifice. It requires in-depth specialist knowledge to know that in this instance (HV electrical circuit breaking), there is a special term for this 'soufflage', which goes beyond the simplistic dictionary definition.
The text quoted as it stands makes perfect technical sense to anyone with the appropriate background; so why then would one seek to ignore the perfectly correct FR word order simply on the basis that there are other anomalies in the document? If the word order did not make sense as is, then one might be justified in questioning the quality of the source text; but i can see no justification whatever for that here. In common with much technical language, it is fairly succinct, and requires some experience to be able to decipher the intended meaning.
There's nothing in the text given to suggest "quirky" usage because I haven't posted any of the quirky usage. You haven't seen the French text which is full of missing words, strange word orders and non-existant punctuation making all terms suspect to anyone working with it. And as I stated before, my very experienced, well educated and successful colleague went for the same "wrong" word order with regard to this term, I suspect, having reflected, for the same reasons as me. To our ears, as people who do only tiny amounts of technical translation, a ventilation blast room simply sounded more likely in English than a blast ventilation room as the most basic of guesses for a very crude starting point irrespective of the French word order (and given there are obviously exceptions to the inversion rule). If I thought the term was correct I wouldn't have asked for help. I take on board your advice re "room" and all other constructive feedback but will reiterate that my guess was just that - a guess, actually only provided because I've been criticised for not providing one in the past. I'd have preferred not to give one as I had no idea how to translate the term in English.
There is nothing in the text given here to suggest "quirky" use of word order, and the addition of 'local' might indeed be conveyed by 'room' — BUT it does need to be in the right place!
Note that this is not 'local de ventilation soufflage' — which would be closer to your proposition.
On the basis solely of the text in front of us, this would still mean 'arc flash venfor the roomspace' — though in this instance, 'area' might be a better translation, since 'room' can conjure up the wrong kind of image of quite a lot of things that are describe as 'local' — e.g. 'local pubelles' > 'bin area' etc. Once again, here, 'local' in essence means 'place where something is located / something if done / happens' — 'local technical', 'local TGBT', etc. etc.
Thanks Tony. I should have explained that the full term is actually "ventillation soufflage local". Hence my use of "room" (the term has been used throughout to mean "room" as far as my colleagues and I can tell). The word order throughout is also slightly quirky and my colleagues have discussed ignoring common word ordering rules in certain cases. We hadn't actually discussed ignoring them here but my very experienced colleague also went with the same "wrong" order for her best guess (similar but not identical to mine) so I think there may be something in the source subconsciously telling us to disregard convention.
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Answers
1 hr confidence:
arc flash vent
Explanation: In your own proposed translation, you have first of all overlooked the very common word orer inversion betwen FR and EN; once you get that right, things start to fall into place: this is 'ventilation' of the 'soufflage'
You're quite right, in HV work we do talk about things like 'air-blast circuit breakers' — but as the 'soufflage' here is in fact the result of that blast, it is more commonly referred to as 'arc flash'.
This is unlikely to be a 'room' as such — possibly some kind of exhaust duct to the outside, for example. I am suggesting 'vent', as being perhaps more applicable to a 'space' of some kind; you might stick with 'ventilation' if you prefer, but to me that rather suggests a 'system' as a whole.
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 3 hrs (2018-10-17 08:01:44 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
So adding 'local' doesn't really change anything, except that you might need to expand it in EN to something like '...for the area / room / space etc.'
The logical word order would make it 'room arc flash vent', but that would be rather inelegant in EN.
Tony M France Local time: 16:46 Works in field Native speaker of: English PRO pts in category: 1250
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