Thanks, Don - and to anyone else who found my little dissertation of interest.
Just returned from taking the dogs for a walk and something triggered a doubt
about the correct terminologies. In fact, the company still hadn't got it right
with the French and I checked Dad's reports again. The term "Eclairage" for
lighting wasn't a good translation either. Currently, the French use that word
for lighting as one might find in a home and it certainly means 'lightning' in
its true sense - and that's probably a misnomer for products out of Lucas :)
The correct term for lights on the switch face should have been 'Lanternes'.
There are still many places in the French speaking parts of Europe where at the
entrance to a road tunnel you'll see the warning sign "Allumez vos lanternes".
Allumer is the verb to ignite and allumage is ignition in an automotive sense.
Therefore "ignite your lanterns" for a car with Lucas electrics would be a
precisely apt term, assuming of course you happen to have a box of matches and
the tool for trimming the wick about your person at the time :)
Jonmac
-----Original Message-----
From: Don Hiscock [mailto:don.hiscock@gmail.com]
Sent: 02 January 2015 14:54
To: John Macartney
Cc: Triumphs
Subject: Re: [TR] A rose by any other name? (A bit of Standard Triumph history
for them wots interested)
John, your recollections are always a delight. Keep 'em coming!
Don
Hi, List
Over the Christmas and New Year break, Liz and I have been busy going
through our possessions. We're 'downsizing' home-wise and too much of
the
stuff "that'll come in useful one day" has had to be reviewed. As you
can
imagine, as someone who spent a lifetime in the UK auto industry, I've
managed to accumulate quite a lot of "come in useful one day" items.
Dec 26
saw me making a start on evaluating several thousand 35mm colour slides
of
vacations in Europe in Standard cars (Vanguards and a Standard Ten
Companion
- aka Triumph Ten Wagon) when they were new and I've kept back too many
cherished pix to be later scanned to a hard disk. It's only sentiment
as I
just can't bring myself to throw them out.
I then got into some of Dad's many internal reports from Canley days
dating
from the mid-fifties and early sixties - before Leyland appeared in
Coventry
- and there are two little aspects I've uncovered this far that I
thought
might entertain you?
The first one relates to the hieroglyphics (my spelling?) on instrument
panel controls. Standard Triumph was probably the first UK manufacturer
to
adopt them on the 1200 Herald / TR4 and this was not without its
problems
back in the day. Up until then, car users had long become accustomed to
words on a knob to describe its function while today, several
generations
have grown up intuitively knowing what a symbol means. For example, the
image of a heater matrix radiating warm air was perceived to be
something to
do with a set of false teeth (!!!!) while the symbol of a throttle
butterfly
in a venturi for the choke completely foxed the majority. It was a
series of
reports about these hieroglyphs and overseas markets that I found most
entertaining but that's worth another story when I've read the rest of
the
reports. It seems the French and the Italians were greatly against
English
words on control knobs and argued with some rationale that they should
reflect the local languages. They argued that if you could build a car
with
varying national specs (laminated windscreens, different wiring looms to
meet local requirements and laws, LH steering, kilometre speedos et al)
then
local wording on knobs shouldn't be a problem.
The French argued and won for 'Eclairage' for lights, 'Chauffage' for
heating (where the false teeth symbol would later appear), 'Essuies' for
wipers, 'Dist d'Air' for the heater directional air control etc. All
well
and good. Somehow, a budding linguist in Engineering failed to fully
research his dictionary for 'Choke' and probably tried to in-build the
term
'strangler' into his deliberations. He could have used 'Melange' which
was
the pre-WW2 term for 'mixture' or its then more modern and current
equivalent of 'Starter'. Note, this does not mean the engine start
button on
sidescreen TR's or the twist switch on the ignition. Instead, the
translator
made a noun out of the French verb to "choke on a piece of food" which
is
'Etouffer' and modded it to 'Etouffeur.' Shrieks of laughter from
French who
always love to mock the Brits and claimed this term *could* also be
interpreted into a person who chokes people to death. So all this
precipitated a mad rush for revised knobs in the correct terminology to
fit
to cars in dealer stocks before they could be sold!!!!!
However, things didn't stop there. A few weeks later, the words for
'wipers'
in Italian was found to have been translated into a slang expression of
a
particular local Italian dialect which common decency prevents me from
clarifying any further and I leave that to your imaginations. Suffice
it to
say it is associated with Restrooms / Toilets :)
I suppose all these little issues are probably par for the course but my
amusement at these 'faux pas' was greatly heightened when I read that
the
company making these various knobs had contracted with the factory for
an
initial stock of 50,000 items of each in four different languages and
there
was no way they were willing to scrub round the mistake or absorb the
cost
for changing the tooling for revised wording.
So when you operate the knobs on your Herald, Vitesse, Spitfire which
all
have the images on them, spare a thought for what happened to the
words. I'm
currently reading the reports between Engineering, Quality Control,
Purchasing and Final Inspection on the tacit issues of the problems
encountered with all the hieroglyphs on the very early knobs which kept
falling out because the insert was a tad too large for the hole and the
glue
to hold them in place didn't last. More anon
Jonmac
(aka John Macartney)
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