[TR] A rose by any other name? (A bit of Standard Triumph history for them wots interested)

Fri Jan 2 09:32:00 MST 2015

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 at 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

On Fri, Jan 2, 2015 at 8:44 AM, John Macartney <john.macartney at ukpips.org.uk <mailto:john.macartney at ukpips.org.uk> > wrote:

	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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