AlexPGP's Corner

A pair of terms popped up yesterday that puzzled me. Both had to do with testing process pipelines. For a while, they made a few swipes with picks and shovels at the back of my mind, but now they've shown up again and started a major mining operation, so it's time to hunker down and figure out what they really mean.

One is "испытание на плотность"; the other, "испынание на герметичность."

"Плотность" usually means "density," but when you fill a pipe with water under pressure and check to see if anything drips out, you're not testing for density. Such a test is a leak test, and indeed, "плотность" can be used in the sense of "tightness" (as in "leak tightness") or "the quality of being leakproof." So there's no problem there; leak testing is pretty common in the engineering business.

Except that about the only meaning for "герметичность" in this context is... "tightness" (as in "leak tightness") or "the quality of being leakproof."

See the problem? They both seem to be "leak tests."

And it's not a case of synonymous usage; the text is referring to two distinctly separate tests (two-thirds of a trio, the third being a material strength test).

After noodling around for about 20 minutes and looking at text that assumes the reader just intuitively knows what's what in the discussion, I ran across the following in a fire safety standard:

Проверку на прочность, плотность материала и герметичность соединений всасывающих головок ... проводят на гидравлическом испытательном стенде.

Suction nozzle strength, плотность of material, and герметичность of joints ... are tested on a hydraulic test stand. [my translation]

Aha!

It was as if someone had thrown a switch.

Apparently, an "испытание на плотность" for piping refers to a test to make sure the pipe hardware doesn't leak (i.e., the pipes have only two holes, one at each end). And consequently, an "испынание на герметичность" tests for leakage at the places where pipes connect to each other (i.e., at the joints).

I think I will call these "pipe leak test" and "joint leak test" (unless I find something better, which I really don't have time for right now).

Cheers...

The staff at the doctor's office did the usual stuff and I walked out with prescriptions to keep me going for awhile, though I did promise to get some blood work done tomorrow. The break sort of put a crimp in my grandiose plans to Get Everything Done As Soon As Possible™, and after making a couple of calls, I managed to stretch some deadlines, so I may end up working a few extra days before we leave for New York to take care of... well... New York stuff.

I've accepted some more work (so much for my resolution), but to be fair, a piece of the new stuff is directly linked with an upcoming interpretation gig, so it's hard to refuse.

As is often the case, the client supplied a glossary with the work, except this is actually a glossary and not a digital slop bucket of stuff that may or may not be actual terminology. Looking the document over (because it's actually possible to do so, as opposed to one of those multi-megabyte, 300-page collections of fish guts), I noticed some terminology issues.

Basically they all have to do with the abbreviations РН, РКН, and РКК, which all appear to be applicable when referring to what is called in English, a "launch vehicle" or LV.

The problem (at least from my perspective) is this: is that the case or are there some subtlties here that escape me, making it incorrect to use LV in each case?

One of these abbreviations, РН, is an old friend. It stands for ракета-носитель or, literally, a "carrier rocket." I have no problem using LV as the equivalent abbreviation.

What the other two guys may mean isn't as clear-cut.

In previous assignments, РКН has expanded to "ракета космического назначения," which has really no good translation, as the Russian literally means "rocket intended for use in space" (as opposed to, I suppose, "rocket intended to blow up that ship over there," mais je rigole...).

The first attempt at standardizing an equivalent English term was "space rocket," which sounds as if the speaker has spent too much time watching serial episodes of Buck Rogers on Saturday morning. Eventually, "integrated launch vehicle" (meaning a launch vehicle with all of the parts attached, ready for propellant loading and launch) gained favor - as did the abbreviation, ILV - and it was a quantum improvement, let me tell you.

However, on this assignment, РКН seems to refer to only the launch vehicle (no payload, no upper stage), so it's not an ILV. Multitran gives "flight vehicle," "space-mission vehicle," and "space rocket" as alternatives. None, as it were, light my fire. So, what is it?

Then there is РКК. I've only seen this Russian abbreviation in one place, and that's as the run-in to the name of one of the (if not the) principal Russian aerospace company, РКК Энергия (or "Rocket-Space Corporation Energia," or "RSC-E" if you're really pressed for time).

"Rocket-Space Corporation" might just work if you're trying to translate the descriptive "ракетно-космическая корпорация," but what might РКК mean when used to describe a launch vehicle?

There's no time to dally now. I've got 3,500 words due starting tomorrow morning!

Cheers...

The word is one I haven't heard before and which Feht says isn't a real word: накоротке.

There's no entry for it in Multitran (although there is a phrase, "контратака накоротке" which is given as a military term meaning "hit-and-run counterattack"). My Oxford dead wood dictionary gives only an example: "произвести атаку накоротке" ("to carry out an attack at close range"), which gives накоротке an initial definition of "at close range," which doesn't work for the sentence I'm translating. So, it's back to Firefox.

The word appears often enough on the Runet, but short of finding a definition (no joy), the trick is to finagle a way (and there is always a way).

One of the Google hits is for an open source program called ++Sim that targets the IM segment and has the tagline "общение накоротке." Might there be an English equivalent? (Frankly, "messaging at close range" sounds pretty lame.) Hmm. I'm not allowed into the SourceForge page, so let's look elsewhere.

Aha! There's a forum post at something called huntclub.ru with the following (with my sight translation beneath):

Горизонтальный крупнокалиберный штуцер целесообразен для опасных охот накоротке (у нас - медведь на берлоге)

A horizontal, large-caliber short rifle is advisable for hazardous hunting <накоротке> (bears in their dens, where we are)

The title of the thread has накоротке in quotes, and suddenly, it occurs to me that I've often heard the phrase "up close and personal" in reference to hunting big game (there are, in fact, over 6,000 hits on Google for the search string "hunting bear 'up close and personal'"). Heck, it's almost a cliché.

There's not much to work with to check my hypothesis, but "Messaging up close and personal" seems to have a certain ring to it, and even better, it makes sense for the context in my translation.

Cheers...