chris collister Jun 3, 2020:

@ Lisa Standard dictionaries (including Termium) are often not a lot of use in technical contexts. To do anything useful, a transistor has to "pass" current. Most transistors these days are field effect transistors, and possess a "gate", "source" and "drain", so nothing to do with drainage! And of course, "sortie" is "output".

Lisa Rosengard Jun 3, 2020:

passant I found a meaning of 'passant' to be 'busy' or 'occupied' in my dictionary (Collins Robert French - English) so 'turned on' looks OK as an answer. I considered the sentence " Le transistor d'accès est alors passant pendant la programmation pour coupler la sortie avec le drain du transistor d'état." and I believe it means "The access transistor is then active during programming in order to accompany the exit with the drainage of the established transistor."

anissa sallemi (asker) Jun 3, 2020:

"commandant passant" here relates to the "transistor", where "passant" alone is supposed to be translated as "on", but here with "commandant passant" i can't figure out how to put it together..

For further clarification:

"Le transistor d’accès TA est alors passant pendant la programmation pour coupler la sortie Q avec le drain du transistor d’état TE."

Thank you

Lisa Rosengard Jun 3, 2020:

passant I ask if 'passer' means 'to wire', not just 'to pass or go by' when it's in an engineering description. With clarification I could help translate the description.