A colleague once asked me what the hardest part of oil & gas translation is. He expected me to say the vocabulary — the blowout preventers, the christmas trees, the annular pressure. It isn't. The hardest part is a comma.
Here's the scene. You get a torque specification table in an English drilling manual, headed for a crew that reads Turkmen and thinks in the metric habits Russian left behind. The English says a casing connection should be made up to 1,250 ft·lb. In the target convention, a comma is a decimal point. Translate the layout without thinking, and you've just told a field engineer to tighten a connection to one and a quarter foot-pounds instead of twelve hundred and fifty. One of those numbers snugs a bolt. The other one is a joke. Except nobody's laughing when the string fails downhole and the day rate on that rig is north of fifty thousand dollars.
That's the specialism. Not the jargon. The numbers, and everything living inside them.
Where legal and technical share a bed
People file oil & gas under "technical" and move on. It's messier than that. Open a typical EPC contract package and you're holding three disciplines stapled together: a legal frame (liability, warranties, force majeure, governing law), a technical core (specs, drawings, datasheets), and a regulatory layer (HSE requirements, local content rules, environmental permits). One document, three instincts, and they pull against each other.
I've written before about how legal translation preserves ambiguity while technical translation resolves it. In an oil & gas contract you do both in the same afternoon, sometimes on the same page. The indemnity clause you leave deliberately careful, mirroring the source's hedges. The pipe schedule two pages later you make ruthlessly precise, because a Schedule 40 pipe is not a Schedule 80 pipe and no amount of context will forgive that. Switch modes at the wrong moment and you've either flattened a legal nuance or fudged a wall thickness. Both cost money. One of them costs more.
The PM who assigns "a technical oil & gas file" to whoever's free rarely knows they're handing over a legal document wearing coveralls.
Units don't translate. They convert. Don't.
Here's my rule, and I'll defend it against anyone who wants to be helpful: a translator does not convert units unless explicitly instructed, in writing, with the target values supplied or the conversion factor agreed.
Oil & gas runs on a schizophrenic mix of systems. API gravity, barrels, psi, inches for casing, and pounds per foot sit right next to bar, cubic metres, millimetres and kilograms because the industry grew up half-American and half-Soviet, and Turkmenistan sat squarely on the Soviet half. So you'll see a document quoting pressure in psi in one table and in kgf/cm² in the next, both correct, both original. The moment you "tidy" that by converting, you become the author of a number. And authored numbers are your liability, not the client's.
I've had files where a well-meaning previous linguist converted barrels to cubic metres and rounded — 6.29 to "about 6.3" — across a production forecast. Small rounding. Compounded over a field's daily output for a year, the gap was a rounding error you could park a supply vessel in. Leave the units alone. If the client needs SI, they have engineers whose job that is, and they sign off on it. Mine is to move meaning across a language boundary without adding new claims to the record.
Decimal separators are the same fight in miniature. English 2,500.75. Russian-influenced Turkmen convention: 2 500,75 — space for thousands, comma for the decimal. Get lazy with find-and-replace and you'll turn a flow rate into science fiction. I keep a checklist for this per project, and I flag every number-heavy table for a second, separate pass where I read nothing but figures. No words. Just digits, units, and separators.
The acronyms that must stay put
The other reflex to kill: the urge to Turkmenify everything. A client says "make it fully Turkmen" and means the sentences, not the tags. BOP stays BOP. Wellhead pressure abbreviations, API standards numbers, ASTM references, ISO callouts — these are addresses, not words. Translate API 5CT into a lovely Turkmen phrase and you've cut the reader off from the standard they need to physically pull off a shelf.
Turkmen has almost no settled oil-field lexicon of its own — the working language on a lot of these sites has been Russian or English for decades, so the "native term" often doesn't exist. My job isn't to invent one on a rig manual under deadline. It's to render the operating text clearly and leave the technical anchors exactly where a technician's eye expects them, usually with the English term in the running text and a gloss the first time it appears.
A good oil & gas translation reads like it was written by someone who's afraid of the field. Not the vocabulary — the consequences. That fear is the qualification.