MurphyWasRight,
Many thanks for your tale... brings back many memories.... !
.. she was totally non technical and had discovered that most of the technical terms did not appear in any dictionary she had access to.
Totally classic... !
And even if the word is there, the meaning provided is irrelevant for the technical jargon which happens to have adopted that particular word for something completely different.
The manuals were full of the typical barerly readable prose produced by engineers forced to write something.
And there you've hit another classic problem!
Documentation is either written by tech writers - who have only a very limited knowledge of what they're writing about - or by engineers who may know very well
what they're writing about, but don't know how to write understandably.
In that respect, French has one more lovely problem... (this is mostly in French > English translation).
French secondary schools teach you to write "literary" French, not "practical" (or, if you like "technical") French.
One of the rules you get hammered into you is not to repeat yourself in the same sentence or even paragraph, so you desperately insert synonyms and convoluted phrasings....
So when referring to the same "thing" in the same paragraph, two or three different words are used, which on closer examination all mean exactly the same thing.
What's the difference between "tangage" et "profondeur", in an aircraft context? None.... both translate to "pitch".... but woe betide you if you had used the same word twice in a paragraph
CJ