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English to English translations [PRO] Bus/Financial - Agriculture / Fruit and Veg
English term or phrase:Wide leather citrus
From a list of exotic fruits, exported/imported to/from China. I suspect this English version may have been a dodgy translation from Chinese or another language, so it could mean "thick skinned" if done with google translate or similar:
Explanation: I think you are right. There are many thick skinned citrus, like naval oranges which are easier to eat and peel because of the thick skin, meyer lemons and others.
Meyer Lemon
•Thick-skinned citrus fruit
•Very juicy and less acidic than standard lemons
Naval Orange
•Sweet, seedless fruit
•Best eating orange
Thick-skinned but easy to peel
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 2 hrs (2010-11-14 13:40:27 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
A BIT OF HISTORY, and another thick skinned citrus. citron.
Native to the hills of northeastern India, the lemon originated as a natural hybrid of citron (a primitive thick-skinned citrus) and sour orange. Cultivation spread to the Mediterranean in Roman times and to California with the Franciscan friars, though a real industry didn't emerge there until the 1890's.
A Chinese writer using "wide-skin citrus", etc. The writer uses "wide-skin" many times in this article. The way he uses it provides clues, he refers to "wide-skin oranges" for instance.
I imagine we still think that it is a citrus fruit of some kind, don't we?
"I think they just mean thick skin (piel gruesa) because "piel" is both leather/skin in Spanish".
I'm sure you know that it is somewhat common to speak of fruit skin in English in the industry. It isn't used in normal speech, of course. And, no guarantees, but I think you said that you thought it came from Chinese? I do too.
My logic is to allow for how different Chinese is, and then follow the _real_ list from the FAO, and compare your list to it. See what is missing. Is (thick-skinned) grapefruit missing, or something else?
As an experiment, I just went to Google Translate; the result for "fruta cítrica de piel gruesa" or "cítricos de piel gruesa" was "thick-skinned citrus". So, even machine translation would not get "wide skinned" _from Spanish_. I tried Chinese too, and although the results were weird, none of them went as far as "wide-skinned". I suspect you have a very bad human translation, or perhaps MT from a worse source than Google.
I suspect that we are looking at an artifact of Chinese. In some languages a colon would often introduce a list, but that is probably not the case in Chinese. So it may be that the original should have been rendered as:
"Citrus: orange, etc."
It seems that you have two problems. One, why is citrus listed separately? Two, wide leather citrus. There is a market for thick skinned citrus, which is both easier to peel and eat, and also has characteristics needed for things like candied peel/rind -- and that is a possible answer to question two. I don't have any ideas at the amount about why they would list citrus separately as the first item.
cuts corners and has the source texts "translated" by non-professionals, so they are usually full of mistakes. The list reads: Morocco -> Citrus, orange, Wide leather citrus, grapefruit.
Just to confirm, are the other items in the list specific tyes of fruits or classes of them?
Automatic update in 00:
Answers
18 mins confidence:
wide leather citrus
pomelo
Explanation: The thick skinned citrus that comes to mind is called a pomelo.
I suppose your text should read: lemons, oranges, pomelos, grapefruit - all these being citrus fruit.
A stab in the dark, of course.
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 28 mins (2010-11-14 11:28:09 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
Thick skin is not a desirable feature - pomelos are delicious and in demand despite (and not because) their very thick skin.
Grapefruit can be both thin-skinned and thick-skinned - like oranges.
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 1 hr (2010-11-14 12:09:28 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
I don't think you can dry citrus fruit into "leather". Never heard of it.
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 1 hr (2010-11-14 12:15:43 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
Please note that you have a list of different types of citrus fruit (orange, grapefruit) and not types of processing (such as: fresh, canned, pureed, leather, etc.).
Sangro Local time: 22:47 Native speaker of: English, Romanian
Notes to answerer
Asker: They also have "grapefruit" in the same list... Most odd... I didn't think "thick skinned" was a desirable feature of fruit but hey! who knows?
Asker: I reckon they must mean "thick"...
Asker: Probably only if the fruit is used as "leather". Acc. to Wikipedia: Fruits can also be dried in puree form, as leather, or as a powder...
Explanation: I think you are right. There are many thick skinned citrus, like naval oranges which are easier to eat and peel because of the thick skin, meyer lemons and others.
Meyer Lemon
•Thick-skinned citrus fruit
•Very juicy and less acidic than standard lemons
Naval Orange
•Sweet, seedless fruit
•Best eating orange
Thick-skinned but easy to peel
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 2 hrs (2010-11-14 13:40:27 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
A BIT OF HISTORY, and another thick skinned citrus. citron.
Native to the hills of northeastern India, the lemon originated as a natural hybrid of citron (a primitive thick-skinned citrus) and sour orange. Cultivation spread to the Mediterranean in Roman times and to California with the Franciscan friars, though a real industry didn't emerge there until the 1890's.
Stephanie Ezrol United States Local time: 15:47 Native speaker of: English PRO pts in category: 8
Grading comment
Thank you to everybody:-)
Notes to answerer
Asker: This (French) client is notorious for his lack of rigour (he once asked me to translate a text from Italian, which I don't speak, alleging it was "more or less the same as Spanish") , so it's likely a mistake.
Explanation: Not certain, but here is my reasoning:
I find that "loose skin" is a normal differentiator for classes of fruit with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization), and the visual nature of Chinese characters (they started out as drawings of the item named) makes me think it might be hard to differentiate between wide and loose. Below is a list of fruits China does happen to export, and that may allow you to use the process of elimination.
"In 1999 China exported 176 thousand MT of citrus fruit valued at US$41.637 million. Among them, loose skin citrus (mandarin and tangerine) accounted for 91.70%, sweet orange 2.71%, pomelo 2.4%, lemon less than 0.1% and the others 3.16% (Fig 1). "
-------------------------------------------------- Note added at 4 hrs (2010-11-14 15:57:04 GMT) --------------------------------------------------
P.S. I know in daily speech we don't speak of the "skin" of a fruit, but it is used in the trade.
Asker: Unless it's a banana. Hmm... I'm still pondering this, I think they just mean thick skin (piel gruesa) because "piel" is both leather/skin in Spanish.
The translation workplace 
peer agreement (net): +1
