Deck seals and deck seal pumps

[Works Dept.]

Hot gas that has had the oxygen burnt out of it is cooled and pumped into the volume over the oil in an oil tanker, lowering the oxygen content so nothing can burn.  To keep the oil gases from sneaking back through this meddlesome inert gas pipe and blowing up the spoilsport machinery at its origin, sink traps are installed, something like the one under the bathroom sink. Inert gas goes through and no natural gas backflow can sabotage the trick. 

To Americans roped into technical writing, what matters is the name of the pipe the inert gas goes through on its way to the hold. That pipe is the deck main. It therefore follows, just as night follows day, that the sink trap is a deck seal, the pumps that move the water into (through, actually) the inert gas (IG among friends) sink traps are deck seal pumps and the pumps that cool the sink traps are deck seal cooling pumps. Stumped for a way to take Mathmanship, the art of writing gibberish nobody but you can understand, to its logical conclusion--there was no way to call the inert gas pumps deck pumps (and be obvious) or IG pumps (and risk comprehension)--the textical manggler in this case package-lumped them in with others as "inert gas and general service pumps," thereby boggling minds out to a radius of 100 feet. 

It turns out the Canadians are not party to the art of Mathmanship, and actually produce bilingual documents. This they do to keep Quebec from seceding, conquering the USA and turning Ameridan* nukes... excuse me, armes nucleaires Ameridaines on their former confreres to extort concessions (such as banning the English language entirely). The result is this pearl: 

http://www.tc.gc.ca/publications/fr/tp4295/pdf/hr/tp4295f.pdf

and its Canadian-language teammate:

http://www.tc.gc.ca/publications/EN/TP4295/PDF/HR/TP4295E.pdf

Together these documents tear the lid right off of the entire mystery so any child can understand that the deck seal is a fraudulent red herring. Sneering at America's scorn, the Canooks bravely call the sink traps deck water seals. The "deck" is preserved to avert hostilities with a belligerent, paranoid, xenophobic, nuclear-armed superpower an inch away from their border. Otherwise the system is clearly explained and forthright. The Canadian Transport Sozialist Arbeiterpartei website offers to coerce to suicide, like the Americans did hacktivist Aaron Swartz (see craphound.com) anyone who so much as looks crossways at the above files, so caveat videtor. But anyone translating oil tanker specs into any Romance language could do worse than compare the French and English versions of this unusually clear piece of technical writing--assuming the Canook prosecutors find no enabling language in the website terms and conditions on which frame an indictment and torture out a plea-bargain.  

And that's the news from Brazil (the movie, not the country)

*Thanks to Saturday Night Live's skit "Amerida" on the furore over the Soviet invasion movie "Amerika"