I bought a used drill
This started like many things start for me. I needed a tool for a project. I bought a used hammer drill at a flea market and but it didn’t come with a chuck key. The chuck is the part of the drill that holds the drill bit. It usually has 3 teeth inside that close as the outer sleeve is turned. To clamp down tightly on a drill bit you need to use a key which has a gear on it, to turn the gear that connects to the sleeve.
Google Translate only gave one result for “Chuck Key” and that was “Spannenschlüssel”. Technically, this is a true translation. But as Google Images shows, these are chuck keys for lathes and things like that. Same name in English, but different class of machine parts.
After some more searching and looking through some part catalogs I found the word “Bohrfutterschlüssel”. Let’s run that through Google Image Search?
Much better! The lesson I have been learning repeatedly as I look up technical terms, is that you simply can’t trust Google Translate. The words might be translated correctly, but the item they refer to might be different. I have been using Google Image Search to verify technical terms and it has been working pretty well.
BOHRFUTTERSCHLÜSSEL
When I learn a new word in German I like to break it apart. It helps me remember it better, and the pieces may help me learn another new word in the future. I think that the way things are named also shows something about how Germans think of things. So, let’s break apart Bohrfutterschlüssel.
- Bohr – Like “Bore” in English, as in To Make a Hole, or To Drill. A “Bohr Maschine” is a drill, in German
- Futter – One translation is “Fodder” or “Feed” (both the noun and the verb). As in English, To Feed can mean to give food to something or, in a machining context, to put more material into a machine. In this case, we are feeding more of the gear from the outer sleeve into the clamping process.
- Schlüssel – Literally it means “key”, just like the Chuck Key we were looking for.
So, a Bohrfutterschlüssel is a drill-feed-key. I guess that makes sense, and its much easier to remember (for me!) when I break it apart like this rather than just trying to remember “Bohrfuttershlüssel”.
Learning New Vocabulary
Discrepancies between what Google Translate says and what words people actually use is part of why I really like walking around stores. What’s the difference between a Bohrfutterschlüssel and a Spannenschlüssel? With Google or a dictionary it’s hard to know. But if you’re at a hardware store you’ll quickly see if you’re in the drill section or the machine shop section.
We had a similar discussion recently about Mirabelle vs Plums. There is a small, smooth-skinned, yellow stone fruit that Germans call Mirabelle. In English we would just say it’s a type of plum. We might call it a Mirabelle Plum, or just a yellow plum. Our German friends however, were quite emphatic that this fruit was NOT a plum, it was a Mirabelle. Even the Wikipedia titles reflect these differences Mirabelle (🇩🇪) vs. Mirabelle plum (🇺🇸).
These sort of non-dictionary delineations are going to take a while to figure out. Slowly walking and reading in the grocery store, the hardware store, the auto-parts store and everywhere else will slowly help. At least it’s more fun than flashcards.
