Melissa McMahon Jan 20, 2011:

Audience issue I assumed the sentence was part of an internal company text describing what had been done, not part of the text for customers themselves - hence keeping the technical terms.

Nikki Scott-Despaigne Jan 20, 2011:

To Bourth I had instinctively thought that getting rid of anything based on "olfactory" was a good idea to start with. We have no information about the type of company nor about its client. If this is the proverbial British person in the street, the same as of the Clapham bus in the past (showing my age?), then yep, we gotta get rid of olfactory. Even "descripteur" and "olfactif" in French strike me as slgihtly technical so if the company is wishing to demystify its jargon, it needs to review the French first!

Christine Kirkham (asker) Jan 20, 2011:

I am more than happy with this clarification - thank you all of you!

Bourth (X) Jan 20, 2011:

If smells are too technical for their clients, maybe words like "olfactory" (vieill'usine!) are too, and they might be better with "smell", "odour", "aroma", "fragrance", "scent", etc.

Melissa McMahon Jan 20, 2011:

Agree with Nikki, or something along those lines: each word/term has been given an olfactory descriptor, or "each word has been given a descriptor that translates it in olfactory terms"

Nikki Scott-Despaigne Jan 19, 2011:

Maybe if you rearrange the original
"chaque mot a été traduit olfactivement par un descripteur" to read
"chaque mot a été traduit par un descripteur olfactif", a knot or two may be untied.

Does something along the lines of this work?

"Each word has been translated by an olfactory descriptor"

http://lasmic.unice.fr/PDF/candau-article-13.pdf

http://isle.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2010/09/29/isle...

Nikki Scott-Despaigne Jan 19, 2011:

More info Hello. Could you post a little more context, in the form of the sentence before and the sentence after the one posing a problem?