Reading foreign engineering documents through figures and standards

How many languages do you have a working knowledge of?

A joking estimate of eleven and a half is given. Familiar engineering figures and standards allow an initial assessment across languages, with deeper work requiring reading and specialist translation checks.

Familiar engineering standards and data layouts can make a foreign document partly intelligible before every word has been translated. One contributor's research practice uses recognizable figures to establish what a record contains and whether it is worth photographing. Notes provide reminders to return for fuller examination. Japanese and Russian are among the languages he names for research, with his total jokingly expressed as eleven and a half. Specialist knowledge also helps him challenge automatic translations that misread technical material. Quick recognition of a potentially useful document is therefore a preliminary step toward careful interpretation of its wording.