Pipeline engineering in French

The eighteenth entry is l’agression extérieure, and the first noun is the one an English reader will take at face value and get wrong. In English « aggression » is always about intent: a person, a state or an animal that sets out to do harm. French uses l’agression that way too — une agression dans la rue is a mugging — but the engineering trades borrowed the word for something with no mind behind it whatever. L’agression is whatever attacks a structure from outside: frost, salt, a chemical, and, on a buried line, the bucket of an excavator. L’agression extérieure is the commonest way a pipeline is holed, and in almost every case nobody intended anything at all. The settled English term is « third-party interference », or « external interference » in a report, and « third-party damage » once there is a hole. Writing « external aggression » turns a contractor who did not read the plan into an enemy, and a safety statistic into an accusation. Keep « aggression » for people, and read l’agression in a technical text as attack in the sense that rust attacks steel.