AlexPGP's Corner

My previous essay was intended to get the synapses firing and fingers flexing as I prepared to translate the French article. A few seconds after posting, I got a call from my client telling me the translation had been scrapped.

Had I been translating instead of musing on the state of human rights in the world, I could have legitimately invoiced some words. Instead,... oh, well... The good news is that a job that had been offered about an hour ago (and refused based on the day's work load) is still open, and it will be of about the same length, so things have (probably) evened out. (Probably, because my client needs to renail the assignment from the end client, which I am told will occur within 30 minutes.)

At any rate, I had spent a couple of hours earlier today researching some of the terms in the article I was about to translate. One of them was "puits de coulée," which occurs often enough in Google to allow me to conclude it has to do with casting metals. Indeed, the French English Dictionary at www.websters-dictionary.org (which looks like a promising source for future reference) offered the English term "casting pit."

But as the subject is aerospace, I decided to refine my Google search to read:

"puits de coulée" lanceur

where "lanceur" means "launch vehicle," whereupon Goggle spit up a site with the line:

Puits de coulée des ergols d'Ariane 5 - bâtiment 304 du centre spatial Guyanais

which is right down my alley. The URL belonged to the Société Antillaise de Forage, and it looked like this:

http://www.safor.fr/FR/Page03.html

One technique that I've found useful in the absence of good online (or dead tree) dictionaries is to replace the "FR" part of the path with "EN". This doesn't always work, but it works often enough to be a useful trick. When I did this with the URL, I was served the English version of the page, where the corresponding line read:

ARIANE 5 propellants run shaft - building 304 of the guyanese space center

This would seem to solve the problem, except that you've got to be careful about the quality of the result, which in this case, to me, for this particular line, smacked of machine (i.e., word replacement) translation. My hunch became stronger when "run shaft" didn't show up in a very useful manner in Google. Worse, the query

"run shaft" Ariane

coughed up only one hit, which (from the Google excerpt) seems more than likely a porn site.

But let's see if we can't salvage something. The reference to "Building 304" at the "Guiana Space Center" serves up an interesting hit from Google, from CNES, with the following:

Another milestone was passed in early December 2002, when the 16-metre-long pit used in the propellant casting process for Ariane 5’s solid booster stages was placed in position. Another pit of the same design will be positioned next to it in 2003.

So it would seem that "casting pit" is what's called for. Too bad the job got canned.

Did someone say "lunch"? No, it's the phone.

The other job is a go.

Cheers...