These two words are not the same thing ....

[davidgillon]

 I was reading some German wiki pages yesterday, and dumped them through 1) the translation feature in Chrome and 2) Google translate itself because I'm lazy, and because I was pretty sure the in-Chrome option had screwed up over and beyond the garbled sentence structure - which was much worse than usual.

In both cases 'sprengwerk' was translated as 'explosive structure', which given the page was talking about installing some lockers in the underframe of a railway car struck me as unlikely to be right. So I went and checked a german dictionary, 'trusswork'. 

'Explosive structure', 'trusswork', these two things are not the same.

Actual sentence: 'Dazu musste das Sprengwerk entsprechend angepasst werden.' 

Actual translation: 'To do this, the explosive structure had to be adjusted accordingly.'

Honestly, any time you jump to 'explosive structure' as your first option is probably going to be wrong.
 

Comments

[green_knight]

I had no idea what 'Sprengwerk' means, so I googled it. The German page is pretty thorough, but the most interesting thing is that the English page linked on the page for 'Sprengwerk' is 'rigid-frame bridge'.

And yes, it is based on a meaning of 'sprengen' which I hadn't known, and it's more interesting than that: 'sprengen' mostly means to destroy with force, but also to use a sprinkler (not what came to mind, but fair do), and to drive animals out of their burrows with dogs, and to move lively and with force (this is archaic, sometimes said of horses. 'Springbrunnen', and indead the english 'spring' [water] are related. 'Absprengen', on the other hand means to separate with force, and here we come to the etymology of 'Sprengwerk': the force is pushed onto the angled supports (trusses?).

Learnt something today!