Johannes Gleim Oct 16, 2016:

@ Bashiqa It depends on how to show the own expertise. I do approach my clients gently and ask for explanations or complement it by reliable sources. And I never lost clients due to such questions or hints. Contrarily to this, my clients are grateful to have a translator who can detect errors and helps to improve the source text. This increases confidence in the translator and leads to more orders rather than less.

The worst approach is to accept definitely wrong statements without queries and to translate literally as the client will become badly reputed by his own clients due to shown incompetency leading to bad feedback correspondingly. In that case, the customer will not look for owns errors, but makes the translator responsible.

Bashiqa Oct 16, 2016:

@Johannes Really good idea to tell your client he doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm sure SafeTex will get lots more work.

Johannes Gleim Oct 15, 2016:

@ SafeTex Please do not forget to replace "2 kg" by "20 N". All other units are obsolete or wrong! The author speaks about weight distribution instead of mass distribution. Weight (poids) is measured in "N", mass (masse) in "kg". And please inform your client accordingly in order to avoid similar errors in future.

SafeTex (asker) Oct 15, 2016:

@ all Thanks everyone. I don't understand a bloody thing of course but I'm going to take Bashiqua's answer as it is the closest to the original text but apparently the equivalent in English (and has the most support from other translators).

chris collister Oct 15, 2016:

Technical translators are often confronted by situations where they know the author is, at best, guilty of sloppy terminology or, at worst, simply wrong. French engineers often like to use 1 daN as being a close approximation to the force exerted on Earth by a mass of 1 kg, but kgf, although not an SI unit, is still widely used and far from obsolete.

Johannes Gleim Oct 15, 2016:

No pedantry The translator can show competency in the subject if he adds a relevant note. Each technician would wonder about "weight per cm" with the units kg/cm.

It its possible to define a line weight (poids per ligne) with the units N/cm, but no "mass line", what the source text implies by using "kg/cm". Even the work around by using the obsolete unit kgf, corresponding to the also obsolete unit kp (kilopond) is not professional. See
The gram-force and kilogram-force were never well-defined units until the CGPM adopted a standard acceleration of gravity of 980.665 cm/s2 for this purpose in 1901, though they had been used in low-precision measurements of force before that time. The kilogram-force has never been a part of the International System of Units (SI), which was introduced in 1960. The SI unit of force is the newton.
:
The term "kilopond" has been declared obsolete[4] and should no longer be used.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilogram-force

Obviously we deal with a technical text, mixed with marketing expressions, not stressing the most essential item, the pressure. Hope that the author highlight it anywhere else in the document.

chris collister Oct 14, 2016:

Pedantic? I wonder how many thousands of teachers have tried to explain the difference between mass and weight? The easy solution here to reconcile weight (poids) and mass (2kg) is just to change 2kg to 2kgf.
Just to make it clear that they are referring to a line density, I suggest "2 kgf/linear cm of roller length"

Johannes Gleim Oct 14, 2016:

Strange description The editor would highlight that the force (in Newton) is below 20 N per centimetre, but uses the wrong unit kg, what is the unit for the mass.

Explanation: On earth a mass of 1 kg (e.g. 1 Liter of water) exerts a force onto the support of 9.81 N, corresponding to the product of mass × earth gravitation, e.g. 1 kg × 9.81 m/s2 = 9.81 kgm/s2.

In fact, this force is not exerted on a line (the famous "generation or generator" of the cylindre), but on a surface. And force per surface is called "pressure". With the example above the pressure is less than approx. 20 N/cm2. This pressure is valid only for a defined situation, depending on the hardness of roller and supporting surface. For ex., the contacting surface of the roller is greater, if placed on sand or soft tissues than placed on a steel plate. The harder both materials, the smaller the contacting surface, and the higher the contact pressure. In reality, no material is infinitively hard, what explains that we do not have "contact lines", but always contact surfaces, even the surface width may be very small, but never "zero". Otherwise the contact pressure would rise to infinity.