Once in a while I do things right. When I changed mobile phone providers and picked up an HTC smart phone in the process, I got into an unlimited data plan mere weeks before the service provider eliminated them, this action being non-retroactive.
So I get to listen to all the German radio I can handle, and have been listening to Deutschland Radio several days a week. Life is good.
However, a few nights ago there was a story about a metal, presumably an element. They said it was used in mobile phones and other small electronic equipment, and that the price of this metal was skyrocketing due to this demand. Unfortunately as I was listening to this, rather than reading, I can’t say for sure how the name was spelled, but it sounded like koltan. I’m guessing it’s some kind of first transition metal; the same story mentioned tantalum.
In German, the names of the more esoteric elements usually omit endings like -ine, -um, and -ium, so for example iodine is Jod and tantalum is Tantal. But I can’t figure out what “koltan” could possibly be. Does there exist a metal that anyone calls “coltanium” in English?
Anyway, in German, this substance is known as Coltan or Koltan. I think it’s what you’re looking for. Generally, the Wikipedia is an excellent “dictionary” for translating nouns from one language to another, using the language bar on the left side of the page.
Coltan.
I wracked my brain cell for ages wondering what “Introgen” was in a brochure for photographic processing machinery and the German was Stickstoff.
Damned if I didn’t use it all the time they had just spelled it incorrectly in the brochure - Nitrogen!
Yes, but you have to know the English name to look it up in English Wikipedia. I did try translating the word at dict.leo.org and got no results, but maybe I would have had better luck with Wikipedia. At least I was on the right track with tantalum, but “columbium” is obsolete, at least in America, having been replaced by “niobium”.
Interestingly, that article claims that it’s you who still call it “columbium”.
[QUOTE=German Wikipedia entry on niobium]
Im angelsächsischen Sprachraum wird auch heute noch von vielen (…) die schon länger veraltete Bezeichnung Columbium (…) verwendet.
[/QUOTE]
Which roughly translates to: “In English-speaking countries to this day many still use the long-obsolete name ‘columbium’.”
Which roughly translates to: “In English-speaking countries to this day many still use the long-obsolete name ‘columbium’.”
[/QUOTE]
I think it’s British people – some of them – who still use the name columbium. As niobium in any event is not something we deal with every day, it’s presumably older British engineers, metallurgists, and other specialists who use the term.
Lessee, there’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium, and hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium, and nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium, and iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium, europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium and lanthanum, and osmium and astatine and radium, and gold, and protactinium, and indium, and gallium <deep, gasping breath> and iodine, and thorium, and thulium, and thallium…
Not at all. You look it up on the *German *wikipedia, then click on “English” in the language bar on the bottom left side of the screen. Since the English Wiki is, by far, the largest of them, pretty much every single page in any of the secondary ones has an English version (in fact, many pages on Other Language wikis are merely straight translations of the English page.)
I just looked it up. “Coltan” is better described as an ore from which the tantalum is refined. It was a bit confusing, though, because when discussing the actual uses of a metal in industry, we don’t normally think of the ores. For instance, if we’re discussing the price of gold and the impact of that on the electronics industry, we don’t normally think about the high price of calaverite, or even of gold nuggets.
