No. 1078
	Present Conditions of Railway Technical Terminology - International Comparison of Concepts and Terms -
	Investigation Committee for Making Consistency of Technical Terminologies in Domestic and International Standards for Railway Terminologies
	According to Technical Report No.887 “Standardization of Railway Technology in the Era of Strategic Standards” necessity of clarifying technical terms and concepts is emphasized as well as active strategy of proposing what are Japanese superior technological products to world standards. Especially, relationship between technical terms and concepts in Japan is quite different from those in Western Europe or in the U.S. and there have been many difficulties in technical communication, translation or explanation when proposing international standards from Japan. To cope with this difficulty, urgent discussion inside I.E.E. Japan of clarifying technology and concept in relation to those in foreign countries has been required in order to propose or to oppose alternatives of new standards effectively. This is also important to reconsider of domestic technologies and their systems to what should be. This kind of problems has not often revealed because many of previous standards were based on specification, characteristics, performance or test methods of individual equipments but in recent years, systems or concepts themselves tend to be standardized and in this case simple translation of technical terms cannot be used because systems and concepts are in almost no cases one-to-one correspondent. This is especially true for the fields of railway signalling and related train operation. This report describes investigation results on correspondence of railway technical terms based on the comparison of them in Japan and in western countries. Terms in western countries are taken mainly from vocabulary and definition of IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) Standards, especially those of IEC 60050 series and compared with Japanese standards (JIS), dictionaries issued by I.E.E. or Railway Technical Research Institute or terms and their explanation of Shorei or Ministry rules. The results are shown in the form of tables categorized by the fields of electric power, rolling stock and signalling/operation.
	©2007. The Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan