# Methancial



## Mariño

Hallo, everyone.
I am translating a technical document INTO SPANISH and I have come across the adjective 'methancial'.
Does anyone know what that is in Spanish?
It is a manual on clean development and it reads "Steam turbines for methancial power are not allowed in the project".
My attempt so far is " En el proyecto, no se pueden emplear turbinas a vapor para producir energía *METANCIAL*".
Thank you beforehand.


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## vicdark

Pareciera que en vez de _methanical _podría ser _mechanical.

_Just my 2 centavos.


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## Mariño

No. It is *methancial*.
I think it has got to do with methane but that is only a supposition.


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## phantom2007

Mariño said:


> No. It is *methancial*.
> I think it has got to do with methane but that is only a supposition.



This term is used in several documents that can be found by a google search. For example this:
cdm.unfccc.int/.../SG34AONFYEU7IK95HJMR6

In my opinion it is a neologism and not yet in any dict I had access to. My intuition tells me that it is related to secondary energy recovery, from the prefix "Meta" that somehow caught a "h" in the wrong place, probably as a word play with _me_c h_ anical_. 

Though Spanish is very reluctant to adapt neologisms, in this case the translation I would use would be "Metancial", whatever the meaning.

Sorry I cannot help much. I suggest you post a question in any neologism forum, such as the one in Cambridge dict blog. If you can find the meaning, then a suitable translation would be easier.


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## sergio11

vicdark said:


> Pareciera que en vez de _methanical _podría ser _mechanical.
> 
> _Just my 2 centavos.



In my opinion, Vicdark is right: it is a typo; not a neologism.  

In most of the documents found in the Internet it is pretty obvious that it is a typo, and some of them you can tell it came from an OCR program.  In all the documents found in the Internet it makes perfect sense to substitute "mechanical" for "methancial," and I think it is the same with your text. 

It says that in the project, "no se pueden emplear turbinas *de* vapor para producir energía *MECÁNICA.*"  It makes perfect sense to me.


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## Blopa

Hola Mariño:

Mi opinión es la misma de Vicdark y Sergio11. Tiene todo el aspecto de tratarse de un error tipográfico.

Al igual que Sergio11, intenté varias búsquedas en Google y Google Images, y no encontré consistencia en las apariciones (que son sólo unas pocas que se repiten). En esas apariciones también parece tratarse de errores tipográficos.

Te recomiendo consultar con el autor del texto o con tu cliente para verificar si es correcto el término, o que te lo explique en el idioma original para que puedas buscar una traducción razonable. Si es el caso, te solicito que nos cuentes .

Saludos,

Blopa


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## phantom2007

El termino esta en varios documentos oficiales y no parece un error tipografico.


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## sergio11

phantom2007 said:


> El termino esta en varios documentos oficiales y no parece un error tipografico.



Perdonen mi escepticismo, pero lo volví a buscar en Google, y los 43 resultados de la búsqueda son todos citas de los mismos dos o tres dudosos documentos originales, que lo único que tienen de oficial es que están impresos. Pero si alguien descubre qué es, por favor, no dejen de avisarnos.


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## phantom2007

Esta semana visitaré "Genera" en Madrid y trataré de averiguar si es un término de la Industria. Avisaré si sé algo nuevo.

En cuanto a si los documentos en los que aparece en Google son "Oficiales" o no, creo que en este caso vá más allá de que estén simplemente impresos. Por ejemplo éste es del Dpto de Defensa de USA y es un documento SAE-AMS5069


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## Mariño

Thank you everyone. I am happy to see this was an interesting subject.
I want to emphasise it is not a typo. It is an actual new word.
I have sent a formal question to the European Parliament (Industry, Research and Energy Committee) so as to know what it involves so we might find an equivalent or create a word in Spanish.


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## k-in-sc

Is the manual in native English? I'm betting it isn't.


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## Mariño

It is. As a matter of fact, I am trying to translate it into Spanish.


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## k-in-sc

*Native* English ...?


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## sergio11

The reason I think it is a typo is that I found the following hits in Google:

1) One citation that talks about "methancial device to generate electricity" and 7 that quote it. Here it would make perfect sense to have "*mechanical* device to generate electricity."

2) One citation that talks about not allowing to use "steam turbines for methancial power in the project," and 16 that quote it. Here, too, it would make perfect sense to have "steam turbines to obtain mechanical power." It is more: not only it would make perfect sense, but the subtitle of that section in the original document says clearly that they are talking about steam turbines used to generate *mechanical* power. So it is clear that it is a typo. 

3) One citation that talks about "methancial ventilation" using the anesthesia ventilator and 12 that quote it. This one I have no doubt that it is a typo, since the anesthesia ventilator to which they refer is a *mechanical* ventilator, not methancial, and methancial ventilation does not exist: believe me, this one I can tell you for sure. 

4) One citation talks about "methancial tubing" and 3 or 4 quote it. This too, is referring to *mechanical* tubing, which is a special tubing in which the unions are not welded by heat or chemical means, and it is also called "as-welded."

5) One or two other loose citations in blogs, which also may have been intended to be "*mechanical*."

All of the 62 hits in Google are quotes of these 5 articles. 

Still, it would be very interesting to hear other theories. Whenever someone finds out something else or thinks I am wrong, please bring it to us.


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## phantom2007

I have consulted with an engineer with experience in industrial instrumentation and he also consulted his colleagues of the generation area. Nobody knows this term. This afternoon I plan to visit a generation trade show in Madrid and hope to find something about this mystery.

Sergio made a very good job investigating all the links from Google and his comments are quite valid. However, the two terms (Mechanical and Methancial) are a little too far to be a typical typo. In particular "T" an"C" are wide apart in a QWERTY keyboard and there would be several letters interchanged. Not impossible, anyway.

The couple "Th" evokes the words "Methane" and "Methanol", both used in sustainable power generation systems. Heat recovery from the exhaust fumes of gas turbines is commonly used for secondary generation using steam turbines or directly for heating water. All this that sounds so complicated could have been compacted in a (possible) neologism such as "methancial", its meaning escaping everybody not being a true insider.


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## k-in-sc

It's a typo and I bet the whole manual is full of errors.


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## sergio11

phantom2007 said:


> ...The couple "Th" evokes the words "Methane" and "Methanol", both used in sustainable power generation systems. Heat recovery from the exhaust fumes of gas turbines is commonly used for secondary generation using steam turbines or directly for heating water. All this that sounds so complicated could have been compacted in a (possible) neologism such as "methancial", its meaning escaping everybody not being a true insider...


Exactly for that very same reason and along the same lines of thought I had not ruled it out 100%, but only 99.99%. I am still waiting to see what comes out of this. 

Regarding the comment about the QWERTY keyboard, it is true that the keys are not contiguous, but that would not be the mechanism of the error, rather some kind of transcription error from someone copying someone else's handwriting.  And in that case it doesn't matter whether the person is a native English speaker or not: we see errors like that every day, made by native speakers of any language. Often transcriptionists don't know the topic matter they are transcribing and invent words.

Of note, in one of the examples it is highly possible that it was composed by an optical character recognition program, because of other errors in the same text. Then the one about "methancial ventilation" was from a non-English speaking country, obviously a transcription error, because it is impossible that a physician may not know the correct word for that case. And, in the final analysis, all of these are the result of sloppy final editing, because people tend to accept the transcriptions of their manuscripts or dictations without reviewing them carefully.


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## k-in-sc

I don't know that it's non-native, it's just a feeling I got from reading that one sentence. I would have to see more to know for sure. Obviously you don't have to be a native speaker to know the word "mechanical," but if the document came from a non-English-speaking country it is going to be more prone to errors of all kinds. You see that a lot with documents from Asia in particular. Anyway, if this is just one of many errors, we are all wasting our time.


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## sergio11

k-in-sc said:


> ...if this is just one of many errors, we are all wasting our time...


I agree. Most of the examples we see in Google are too obvious. But I think it can also be an educational experience in Internet linguistics and research, and it illustrates once again the fact that the printed word is not always right, especially important in a translators' forum.


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## k-in-sc

Everybody goes scrambling to track down this "word" with very little information about the document it came from.


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## jsvillar

Well, the original document seems to be AM0006, which is the Baseline Methodology for Biomass plants issued by UNFCCC. The other links are applications of this methodology to projects, or those results that were commented above.
http://cdm.unfccc.int/methodologies/DB/U3THXNPFFSPP2WO1MFB20DXU1444S5


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## k-in-sc

I'm not seeing the OP's sentence in that document.


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## jsvillar

Sorry, 'the original document ' in which the Manual of Clean Technology is probably based 'seems to be AM0006'. Link to PDF is this: http://cdm.unfccc.int/filestorage/Z/P/5/ZP57DX1FRCNE483SJW2YVTIOLUG6QA/Consolidated%20methodology%20for%20electricity%20and%20heat%20generation%20from%20biomass%20residues.pdf?t=Qk98bTRoazd4fDClp-nhuCW9MD_p4vujpByX, and the coincidence is only in page 4. In the manual version the sentence is shortened.

I'm starting to have suspicions that whoever wrote that manual didn't understand 'methancial', so he just copied the word. (as in "my god, I'm such an ignorant, ok, let's just put the word in here, I'm sure people involved in clean development will know the meaning").


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## phantom2007

I am now convinced. The document AM0006 has several versions (at least 10, 11 and 12). The term Methancial only appears on version 12. The original word must be "Mechanical" according to the context and the typo was probably originated by some format conversion or by OCR. A typical error source is copying from PDF to Word (version 12 has a MS Word copy already including this term) and then exporting again to PDf.  

I stop any further research on this term, thanks everybody.


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## sergio11

k-in-sc said:


> Everybody goes scrambling to track down this "word" with very little information about the document it came from.



Well, I thought I had found the original document where this sentence comes from, and it is the one where its being a typo is the most obvious. It is the "Consolidated methodology for electricity and heat generation from biomass residues," from the United Nations, where it talks a lot about generation of mechanical power from different sources, one of which is the steam turbines. Then in one of the paragraphs, under a subtitle that clearly refers to mechanical power generation, you suddenly find this "methancial" word where "mechanical" should have been. And this is for the Kyoto Protocol, so who knows where it was written; it might have been anywhere in the world where those meetings take place, with delegates from every country. Here it is:



> If some of the heat generated by the project activity is converted to mechanical power through steam turbines, for mechanical power generation: Scenarios M2: to M5:





> In the case of M2 and M3, if the steam turbine(s) are used for methancial power in the project, the turbine(s) used in the baseline shall be at least as efficient as the steam turbine(s) used for methancial power in the project;
> In the case of M4 and M5, steam turbine(s) for methancial power are not allowed for the same purpose in the project.



In Spanish we say, "más claro, echale agua," which I think I don't need to translate for this crowd.


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