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Explanation: When you 'burn' a CD / DVD, you record information onto it from your computer.
'Burning off' simply means copying the information off your computer onto a physical medium.
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 43 minutes (2014-04-22 15:58:11 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
I should have said that there is almost certainly an equivalent jargon term in FR — my only real concern was to get the correct interpretation of the source text; I feel sure my native French colleagues will be able to give us a better formulation in FR!
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 1 heure (2014-04-22 16:21:41 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
Great, as François says, the proper term in FR is probably 'graver' — depending on your surrounding context, it may or may not be necessary to render the notion of 'off'
Ah, that's the whole point — my knowledge is based on many years' practical experience in the field, and tools like the 'Net, dictionaries, etc. serve merely to confirm or expand on my practical knowlegde. This is why I rarely give Internet references — once I have given an Asker an idea, based on my own experience, I assume any serious translator is capable of going off and doing their own research to confirm (or not) to their own satisfaction the suitability of the term for their particular context.
"Let alone that plain "burn" hardly made its way to the dictionaries." yes, but... You don't need to be an Uber-Geek to have heard of "burning" a CD or DVD; one more example showing that dictionaries and glossaries can't beat paying attention to the real life use of language.
Well, it depends where you are standing. You are a native English speaker with a broad knowledge of engineering jargon, while most translators are native in the target language. Is it really obvious, if you had not come across "burning off" as an insider, to find it with a google search, for instance? Let alone that plain "burn" hardly made its way to the dictionnaries.
This is not "tricky" — it is perfectly standard, widely-used technical terminology. There is no grammatical or other linguistic justification for rejecting this term, just because maybe you don't happen to have come across it?
This is too funny to be taken seriously. Of course your translation is correct, but as for the original English, valid/acceptable does not make it correct :). Technical language is a tricky issue.
There is nothing whatsoever wrong with the term 'burn off' — it is typical technical jargon, just as 'in the olden days' we might have said 'copy off to...'. The notion of 'off' comes from the idea of transferring it off one medium onto another. We nowadays say 'to burn a CD', but originally the notion would have been 'to burn onto a CD'. The use of 'off' is common, especially where the original medium is in some way ephemral — as perhaps here, in the case of security videos, which are automatically erased on a rolling basis every (say) 24 hours; so it is clearly vitally important to copy important evidence off to some more permanent format before it gets wiped!
It does seem more logical that evidence of an incident should be reproduced rather than disposed of.
Given the additional knowledge of the author not being a native English speaker I would put my money on Francois, Anca and Tony, if I were a betting man.
peer agreement (net): -1