tirare le marce

B

Biaud

Member
Italian
Come posso tradurre in inglese la nostra espressione 'tirare le marce'? (della macchina inteso...)

Grazie a tutti!
 
    • Benzene said:
    Ciao a tutti!

    Potrebbe essere corretto dire: "to use short shifting"?

    Bye,

    Benzene
    Click to expand...
    ciao anche a te!
    Actually, "short shifting" is the opposite: the gear is changed when the engine is not revved enough.
    I use Teerex51's expression: "rev the gears". I should say "used", because nowadays I drive an automatic :)

    rrose17: "rev the engine" just means "floor it" :) you can do it even with the transmission in neutral. "to rev the gears" means pushing the gears to their limit, that is to wait shifting until the RPM are in the red zone.
     
    Hmmm...

    "Power shifting" is changing the gear without using the clutch.
    "Rev the engine" (as stated above) is just giving it gas, usually without the transmission engaged.
    I'm not really sure what "rev the gears" means.
     
    Ok Ok I'm not going to go at this like my life depended on it but...:)

    I drive a standard and if someone were driving my car and they were letting the tachometer go too high before shifting gears I'd say you're revving the engine too much. It's not the meaning only the common usage that I'm referring to.
     
    rrose17 said:
    I've always heard to rev the engine rather than the gears.
    Click to expand...
    :thumbsup:

    I agree. I'm certainly no expert, though I've never hear to rev the gears. Even at the beginning of a race, you hear the commentator say "...and the drivers are starting to rev their engines!!"

    I don't like to rely too much on Google, though in this case I think it's fairly irrifutable:
    rev the engine = 7,950,000 hits
    rev the gears = 2,040 hits
     
    But 'rev the engine' and 'tirare le marce' are two different things.
    To rev the engine = dare gas (al massimo).
    It might be that AE speakers do not have an equivalent expression to ours because, as someone say, everybody drives automatic cars. Is there any BE speaker around who can help?
     
    Well I'm in North America, and it's true that Quebec seems to be the one place where standard cars are still extremely common. And revving the engine does mean giving the engine gas while in neutral but I'd stil use the expression as stated above for gears. Revving the gears just doesn't seem to make sense, maybe pushing the gears, but not revving. If you drive in 3rd gear at 20 km/hour we'd say you're lugging the engine, never lugging the gears.
     
    furs said:
    But 'rev the engine' and 'tirare le marce' are two different things.
    To rev the engine = dare gas (al massimo).
    It might be that AE speakers do not have an equivalent expression to ours because, as someone say, everybody drives automatic cars. Is there any BE speaker around who can help?
    Click to expand...

    Everyone does not have automatic cars in North America, though that really is neither here nor there.

    Again, I'll give my example of a race here (of which all the cars would be manual transmission of course) in which you would hear "rev your engines".
     
    Teerex51 said:
    And exactly what would your point be? :confused:

    PS: they mention "revving the engine" in neutral, aka blipping the throttle with the clutch pulled, i.e. technically in neutral.
    Click to expand...

    My point is simply that the example you gave even has rev the engine used more than rev the gears. Additionally, all the native speakers here are saying that they've only heard rev the engine and never rev the gears. I'm not saying rev the gears is never ever used or that it's incorrect, I'm saying that until I see evidence to the contrary, I believe the common phrase used in English, whether BE or AE, is rev the engine.
     
    I think we would do well to defer to Teerex on this, an obvious expert on such matters, in both languages! ;-)
     
    And what about "stretch the gears" - I looked it up and it seems to be a fairly common idiom, meaning both "modifying the gear ratio (mechanically)" as well as "redlining the gears".

    What do you think , T-rex ?
     
    I can only speak for the usage of "rev(ving) the gears" in the car/motorbike milieu I'm familiar with (both in Europe and across the pond).

    There's no point in counting Google hits (Rev engine vs rev gears) because it's truly apples and oranges :warning:

    • Rev the gears means to accelerate close to the red line before upshifting. Period.
    • Rev the engine could mean the same but it's also widely used to describe a quick
      gas input/throttle blip respectively in a car with manual transmission (double-clutching or even double-declutching) or a motorbike while downshifting.

    Stretching the gears/Pushing the gears may also work, but I'm unfamiliar with such expressions, which also lend themselves to different interpretations (modifying the gear ratio, reassembling a transmission, etc.)

    So where's this leave us?

    Other than a highly interesting thread full of passionate contributions, I think we'll all go back to calling those actions the way we've always called them (and I suspect some contributors still aren't entirely clear on what's what, but hey, it's the Internet :p).
     
    Teerex51 said:
    Rev the gears means to accelerate close to the red line before upshifting. Period.
    Rev the engine could mean the same but it's also widely used to describe a quick


    gas input/throttle blip respectively in a car with manual transmission (double-clutching or even double-declutching) or a motorbike while downshifting.
    Click to expand...

    Exactly the point I was timidly trying to make. Well said.;)
     
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