Factorio Forums

TLDR: please provide synonyms/alternative ways to say "circuit network".

The french community is struggling to translate this term into understandable French.
Could someone elaborate on their interpretation of these words?
I think the trouble we have is that "circuit" has many meanings in French, among which the right one, but it is too confusing to keep this one. Here, "circuit" has a complex and abstract meaning, which makes it hard to find alternatives for this word.

The few tries we had at translating it meant something like "wire[d] network" or "electronical network". Some other (not so convincing) ideas we had were "factory network" or "combinatorial network".

I had a look at some definitions for the word "circuit":

Collins wrote: "a complete path through which an electric current can flow".

Cambridge wrote:closed system of wires or pipes through which electricity or liquid can flow"

As an aside,according to the two definitions I find that "circuit network" is a bit redundant, don't you think?
I think Collins' concept is more related to Factorio's. We can definitely consider that the signals on the circuit network are (low-voltage) electric. However the notion of "path" is way too generic - for this Cambridge helps and brings up "wires". However I find it quite far away from the original term "circuit" ; in its original meaning, circuit network does not exclude wireless connections (although AFAIK only wires are supported in vanilla). Another drawback is that the french translation for "wire" makes me think of an Ethernet network as opposed to Wi-Fi network, that's why I think "wired network" is not a good option.

What variants would you use for "circuit network"? What is the literal translation you've had in your own language?

In German "Circuit network" is translated to "Netzwerkschaltung" - "Network circuitry" translated back to English.
In any way, "network" has to be included in the translation.

But the wired network isn't that bad, an earlier German translation actually was "Kabelnetzwerk" - "Cable network". Even though it really sounds like a LAN.
Well it indeed IS a LAN: You connect devices (machines, combinators and stuff) into a big network (or more smaller networks), we know this as "Internet" via Peer-to-Peer connection. (I don't know what exactly P2P is, I might be wrong)

You could opt for "signal network" instead, if that would make more sense. That's what it is really, a bunch of wires that carry signals. I'm sure the distinction would still be preserved between "logistic network", "electric network", and "circuit/signal network".

In Polish I translated it into the "control network". It simply describes how network exactly works.

In Hebrew - simply "logic network".

Thank you all for your suggestions.
I suggested signal network and logic network (I believe control network wouldn't really make sense in French), and the votes are in favor of logic network.
I dismissed wired/cable network because from what I read on the circuit network planned features, it might be possible for a radar to transmit circuit network signals without any wire. If this comes to vanilla or even gets modded, the translation wouldn't really make sense.