Tony M Jan 5, 2012:

@ DF I rather feel the same way, but not being a FNS, I hardly feel qualified to judge. However, I was just a bit worried, as the first thing 'centrale à vapeur' conjured up for me was of course an ironing station!

That's why I asked about the scale here — in my FR > EN work, I've even come across 'groupe vapeur', which could be possible for a smaller 'plant'.

Didier Fourcot Jan 5, 2012:

@Tony If there is an agreement that "power" is redundant, then Gilles' suggestion "centrale à vapeur" is ambiguous enough to cover what the English source that not specify and that we ignore?

Tony M Jan 5, 2012:

@ DF We've already seen that the EN is somewhat defective, and I think the redundancy of 'power' is perfectly understandable — particularly if the steam were being generated not only for the purpose here, but also for providing motive power for something else as well.

We must also consider that the text may already have been translated from some other language (at least in the head of the writer!) — if it had been 'centrale vapeur', for example, in FR, then it is easy to see how the 'centrale' part might get wrongly translated out to 'power plant' (MT?)

Didier Fourcot Jan 5, 2012:

Power plant or steam plant? A power plant produces prower, and I do not know of any of them that does anything with the steam generated: it is simply dissipated into the atmosphere that acts as a cold source, the suggestion from Daniel marquis "centrale électrique" is correct for the term but I cannot see how this could apply to the rest of sentence, do power plants sell their condensed steam (that I suspect contaminated with a number of industrial wastes)?

A "steam plant" should rather be a "steam generator" (SG in English, GV in French for Générateur de Vapeur), some of which may be adequate sources of condensed water reasonably pure (higher resistivity), and may also be part of a power plant

I guess we are missing a proper context for this sentence: wher should this water be used and in which kind of plant?

Tony M Jan 5, 2012:

Error in English Note that it should be 'steam power plant' — the plural 's' on steam is not correct, and could lead to confusion.

In fact, your whole text seems to be slightly faulty, is this by any chance an OCR'ed document? I notice that 'or' should in fact be 'of', and of course in the 21st century, there is no 'e' on 'shall'!

The correct answer may well depend on what this overall plant is for, and the kind of scale, as 'steam plants' can vary widely in size.