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Quality qualificatif

Hello all,

Apologise if I posted this in the wrong group. Feel free to redirect me to the appropriate one if needed,

I'm a french native speaker working in an engineering department in aeronautique. I have some issue to describe a concept for which I can't find any english-french translation. In french, we have a specific word to describe ( kind of ) the relation between manufactured tolerance and cost to achieve this tolerance. I 'll take an example so it might make more sense. Let's say on a drawing I have a dimension of 20.000 +/- 0.001. This dimension is fairly tight and has a cost to manufactured, but this dimension could be loose up to 20.000+/- 0.020 and it will not affect the function associated to it but will drop the cost ...

The french term to describe to this condition is " sur-qualite ", a straight forward translation gives over-quality. This last one doesn't ring the bell to my fellow workers.

Does anyone know the translation of this " sur-quality " ?

Thank you

Stephan

Reply to
strolgen
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This may not be the best group, but I'll give you my opinion anyway:

The best translation I can think of is "over-engineered" (note it's an adjective, not a noun, so one would say "that shaft is over-engineered" not "that shaft has over-engineering").

Over-engineering is usually applied to designing in too much stuff, or too much strength into the stuff one uses, rather than making the tolerances too tight. In your specific case we'd probably say "the tolerances are too tight". This superfluity of words to describe what ought to be a simple concept may be why Americans are good at making really expensive stuff a few at a time, and the Japanese and other Asian countries are good at making lots of stuff that's only as good as it has to be and selling it cheap.

I hope this helps.

Reply to
Tim Wescott

...

I would probably say "overspecify" or "overspecified", depending on whether a verb or adjective is wanted. There are other expressions. "Gilding the lily" comes to mind. (That's a misquote of Shakespeare's "Gilding fine gold or painting the lily.") "Dumb" also comes to mind.

Jerry

Reply to
Jerry Avins

Thanks. This was helpful and emphasis exactly where come from the problem : Engineering definition

Reply to
strolgen

I like Gilding the lily ... I don't know what that's "mean" but look funny

=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF= =AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF

Thanks again to both of you I appreciate your answers Stephan

Reply to
strolgen

Gilding is to glue gold leaf to something. Presumably a lily is already beautiful enough, so gilding it is stupidly redundant.

At any rate "gilding the lily" in colloquial American (and probably British) parlance means that you're over-doing it, expending time (and possibly money) on an effort that's already done more than well enough.

Reply to
Tim Wescott

you might try posting this to sci.lang.translation, a newsgroup used by people who get paid to do translations. they take a strong interest in getting it right.

vale, rip

Reply to
rip pelletier

A widely used term in the process industries is 'giveaway', implying value that is being given away because of overcompliance to specifications. It's a noun, usage example: There is high giveaway on the propylene product (eg. because the market purity spec is 99% and we're using more energy to generate 99.5%).

Reply to
Bruce Varley

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