Working on a form to help collect information about damaged facilities. Many of these facilities will be single-building facilities, but some will have separate buildings assembled on a campus (e.g. schools). Sample questions:
[ul]
[li]Nombre del **edificio **dañado (Name of damaged facility):[/li][li]Ubicación del **edificio **dañado (Location of damaged facility):[/li][li]Propósito principal del **edificio **dañado (Primary purpose of damaged facility):[/li][li]¿Instalación crítica (Critical facility)?[/li][/ul]
Trying to decide whether edicifio or instalación – or some other word – is a better fit on a data-collection form like this if the goal is to use a single term throughout … the way we can with English “facility”. Edificio seems to be a term that’s very specific to a single building and won’t sound right for a multi-building campus. Instalación seems to be too suggestive of power plants or factories – though I am not a native speaker by any means. The actual facilities on which we will be collecting information will chiefly be schools, maybe a community college, health clinics, elder-care homes, churches, and community centers.
If it makes a difference on an “officialese” form … 90% of the form’s users will be from Puerto Rico, many from rural areas. A small number will be from the Dominican Republic and various Central American nations.
I did find a site called linguee.com that seems to have a large corpus of texts that are already translated into many languages. English-Spanish texts are numerous.
The good thing about linguee.com is that you can type in phrases, and it will return (a) existing online (I think?) text that matches what you’ve written, and (b) an existing translation of that same text.
So, I punched in the phrase “facilities such as schools and hospitals” and here are two examples (from about 25) of the results:
… which puts them also in disadvantage in the treatment of facilities such as hospitals, schools, restaurants, etc. … los que supone también una desventaja en el tratamiento de instalaciones como hospitales, escuelas, restaurantes, etc.
… and ensuring the security of facilities such as schools and hospitals.
*… y la garantía de la seguridad de instalaciones como escuelas y hospitales. *
So, almost all of these results come back with instalaciones – a few use servicios in the same context.
If terms like sitio dañado and sitio crítico makes sense in Spanish, and be understood to refer to various types of public facilities … sitio might work.
Hmmm … since both words are masculine, how about terms like sitio/edificio dañado or sitio/edificio crítico?
Edificio is building. Right now I’m in the office building of a factory: en el edificio de oficinas. Instalación normally refers to a specific group of machines with a specific and common function. The HVAC system:* la instalación de aire acondicionado. Las instalaciones de la línea 1*: production line 1 with all its machinery and attachments. Sitio or lugar can be smaller or larger than a building. It’s just a space, it can’t be critical. ¿En qué sitio te sientas? Where exactly is your desk?
Several of those translations you found are from English to Spanish and done by people who are going word by word. They’re parallel translations; occasionally they may have put the adjectives in the right place, but that’s about it. No changes to punctuation except for perhaps the addition of opening marks in exclamations or questions, and these often have to be defended to a client who expects the translation to look exactly like the original.
I would use edificio or instalación depending on the exact meaning.
OOT: Using edificio when it’s a group of buildings is not a problem, so long as the group has a name that can be provided or the answer can be free-form. If I was filling a maintenance report for a spot between this building and the labs, I’d be able to choose the code for “Factory 1234” from the list of codes and would indicate the exact location in the description.
side question: Have you, Nava and Colibri, ever come up with conflicting replies in the same thread because of local variants in your respective necks of the woods? *
Back in Puerto Rico, “instalaci(ón/ones)” is the standard usage for “facilities” as in structures+equipment+grounds in most written governmentese; when used in the generic abstract it is often seen in plural. Instalaciones médico-hospitalarias, instalaciones de transportación, instalaciones deportivas.
“Estructura(s)” is used to mean edifications of all kinds from an antenna to a bridge to a high-rise, but with a connotation of specifically self-standing nonremovable physical objects and not counting contents. “Edificio(s)” does have here a connotation of being human-occupable and a secondary one of significant size so sonetines “edificaci(ón/ones)” is used to avoid that.
“Conjunto de (estructuras/edificios)” is used to refer to a site with multiple edifications. Or you can also call it a complex (complejo) but that has a connotation of larger scale.
“Local” indeed (as “el local” or “un local”) is used to mean the structure housing a business or other activity, in the sense of “the premises”.
“Site” is a bit trickier, as “sitio” is used interchangeably with “lugar” to mean simply “place” and we say things like “construction zone” or “test area” rather than “site”.