a long sentence that puzzles me?
December 5th, 2011 | 
Author: Question by A translator: a long sentence that puzzles me?
“Development of a transducer for in-line and through cycle monitoring
of key process and quality variables in injection molding”. the way the two prepositions (“for” and “by”) are combined confuses me. what does “in-line” mean? is it an adjective or a noun? transducer is a kind of device. can someone explain the whole sentence to me ? i am not a native english speaker. many thanks!
Best answer:
Answer by ROBERT
That paragraph looks like Japanese translated into English by a Japanese technical writer. It is hard to decipher but if you study it for a long time then it will start making sense when you start thinking like a Japanese person. Been there done that.
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Breaking the sentence into parts:
A transducer converts energy from one form to another. Injection molding transducers convert process temperature and pressure values to electronic signals that may be interpreted and used to evaluate or control the process.
The sentence you quote does not include the preposition “by.”
“In-line” is an adjective, as used here. It modifies “monitoring.” As used here, it suggests continuous measurement. I interpret “through cycle” to meant “through-cycle” which suggests measurement at specific times of a process sequence, rather than continuous measurement, but I’m not familiar with injection molding so this is a guess.
Rather than paraphrase the sentence, I will just say that, to me, the statement refers to an instrument which gives signals corresponding to significant variables in the process of injection molding, and which may either provide these measures continuously as the process goes on, or at significant times during (or possibly after) the process.
As a check, my interpretation would apply to the Abstract given in a similar description in an on-line Abstract:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6THG-4PYP6YY-2&_user=10&_coverDate=02%2F15%2F2008&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1282703184&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=d08d294f162d6e276e1ccc637b7dbb4a
.