Discussion: diocese callipers

"Please note that there are no diocese callipers."

This was taken from the rules for the Tio Mila on the English language website: http://www.10mila.se/2006/index.asp?page=135&avd=3...

Is that the technical term for those Braille-like punch thingies? Or is it just a translation from Swedish?

And what is gaffling?

"Gaffling" means forking.

Diocese callipers is a very strange translation of the Swedish work "stiftklämmor", which would be called "punch" in English.

As you puzzle through Swedish and Swedish-English, a good resource is Steve Hale's online Swedish-English orienteering dictionary at:


http://www.siphon.info/WordWeb.py

In the US, is "forking" regularly used instead of "gaffling"? (To the best of my knowledge, in the UK we always use "gaffling".)

Yes; likewise in Australia.

swenglish... guess what the swedish word for "fork" (as in the utensil) is.

Gaffel?

Yes, fork is 'gaffel' in Swedish.
My reaction to the term ´diocese calliper' was - as Spike pointed out - that it is a very strange translation from Swedish. Someone with not too much knowledge of the English language has definitely looked the word 'stiftklämma' up in a dictionary and tried to make a word-by-word translation.
Stift is correctly translated as 'diocese' (in the church administative meaning), but the context is a bit off and it should really have been the other existing alternative which is 'pin' or 'tack' (as in thumb tack).
Where they got the word 'calliper' from I can´t for my world understand...
Punch is probably the best word to use - if that is enough to separate in from 'e-punch'.

Thanks for the link to the Swedish to English orienteering dictionary. Does anyone have any other online Swedish to English resources for general translation help?

Lexin: http://lexin.nada.kth.se/swe-eng.shtml is excellent, best if you only need to look up occasional words. it's a dictionary, so it doesn't do phrases. but you get multiple meanings and usage.

other text translation services are less accurate, but workable. try http://www.systranbox.com/systran/box for whole pages.

I was at a World Cup race in Sweden (in Gamleby, I think) where the organizers translated "brant" to "sheep" -- which was actually just a typing mistake ("brant" could be translated to "steep").

What was funny about the whole episode was that they were trying to explain that many of the outcrops and cliffs on the map were dangerous. So, they warned us of "many dangerous sheep in the terrain."

That's funny. I went to Sweden for my honeymoon and got to participate in the WOC recreational courses in 2004. The man at the start who gave me my map didnt speak English. He spent about 3 minutes explaining something to me in Swedish, and then sent me on my way. Turned out I couldn't even find the 1st control, came back with my tail between my legs, and later my husband informed me that the map was misprinted. It said 1:15,000 but it was actually blown up to 1:10,000. I was a bit more inexperienced and didn't realize the error on my own. That man was probably trying to tell me about the change, but I was oblivious.

Where they got the word 'calliper' from I can´t for my world understand...

Well, what's the Swedish word for these?

I really don´t know: I wouldn´t call it 'klämma' anyway - since that´s the word they would have looked up (?). But I have to agree that these things are not within my line of expertise - I don´t even know what they are used for... (so I had to look it up: "mechanical device used to determine small lengths with reasonable accuracy"). I guess they look a little bit like a punch though.

Another possibility (now that I'm at home with my Swedish dictionary: 'klämma' can also mean 'clip' (as in 'klämma för papper' -> 'paper clip'), and in fact I believe a punch is called a clipper in some English speaking countries (e.g. New Zealand). So maybe they were trying to say 'clippers' instead of 'calipers'.

That sounds like a possible explanation, but maybe we´ll never get to know. The person who made the translation will probably never admit it after all this ;)