La filance

Hello everybody. I am translating a scientific paper on the effect of a clay on the GI tract. There is a term I can't quite understand: "la filance". Here's a piece of text that mentions it:

Les mesures de filance montrent que les seils biliaires altérent les proprietés rheologiques de la adhérente de mucus a muqueuse jéjunale (sorry for not including all the accents).

Your help in translating "filance" will be most appreciated.

María Elena

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on March 28, 2012 at 6:51pm

I think this is viscosity. The words filance and filante can be found in this wikipedia article:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_menstruel

I also translate medical texts so I very much sympathise with your problem. Lookups in the French wikipedia can be very useful.

My dictionary gives pouls filante, as a weak or "thready" pulse, but in context I don't think that's very useful.

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Permalink Reply by Riley Stewart on March 28, 2012 at 11:25pm

It means "spinnbarkeit", which in turn means "the capacity of a viscous liquid (especially the cervical mucus) to be drawn out into a strand or blown up into a bubble".

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on March 29, 2012 at 12:35am

He's right, and to my surprise there's a wikipage about it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinnbarkeit

A colleague suggests viscoelasticity.

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Permalink Reply by María Elena Sánchez Salazar on March 29, 2012 at 2:06am

I think "viscoelasticity" better describes what "filance" means. Thanks very much indeed to you both. Cheers from Mexico.