Biotechnology

Biotechnology is genetics plus process engineering, and its vocabulary arrives from both directions: el vector de expresión and la cepa recombinante from one side, el fermentador and el rendimiento del lote from the other. Two thirds of the way down stands a word where English has made a distinction Spanish has not. La contaminación covers both of the things English calls « pollution » and « contamination »: the river with the factory upstream, and the batch with one stray organism in it. In English the two have drifted apart in register as well as in meaning — pollution is a public matter, argued about in parliaments, while contamination is what a laboratory finds and reports. Spanish uses one noun for both, so the sentence has to say which scale it means; the last entry of this list, la inactivación antes del vertido, is exactly where the two meet.